


4.04: ...in Shining

by Amand_r



Series: Torchwood, Season Four [6]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-27
Updated: 2010-10-27
Packaged: 2017-10-12 22:09:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/129655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amand_r/pseuds/Amand_r
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A routine search unearths a blast from the past that Jack and Gwen were sure was gone, and an accident has horrifying consequences for some of Cardiff's inhabitants.</p>
            </blockquote>





	4.04: ...in Shining

In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli  
Bodies of holy men and women exude  
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.

But under heavy loads of trampled clay  
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;  
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.  
\---Yeats, 'Oil and Blood'

 

" _The Jazz Player_ ," Gwen mused, looking at the sign for the private club. "I always thought this was some private snooty music club."

Jack smiled and knocked on the door. "That's the point."

The eye-slit opened and something peered out at them. Gwen could already tell the eyes weren't human. Why was Cardiff suddenly alive with alien life where she'd never noticed it before? Even when Jack had been gone the first time, the four of them had never noticed this much alien activity right under their noses.

"Benny, it's me," Jack said, blinking. The eye just narrowed, and so Jack reached up, widened his eyelids with his fingers and said "I'll use my credit card," in a very American newscaster voice.

The eyes crinkled as if it recognised something. Maybe the rest of the face was smiling, and then she heard, "Harkness! Get yer arse in here!"

"You have to open the door first, Benny," Jack reminded him.

The eye widened. "Oh! Yeah!" and then the eye-slit slid shut and Gwen heard the metal click of locks being thrown. Jack turned back to them.

"Benny," he whispered. "Memory of a ferret, heart of a walrus."

"Heart of a walrus?" Lois asked under her breath as the door swung open.

Jack simply smiled over his shoulder and led the way into the dark corridor, where Benny, a huge hulking wark, waved from behind the open door. "Madam is going to have kittens when she finds out you're back," he said.

Jack shoved his hands in his pockets and ushered Gwen and Lois in front of him, down the hallway a bit, perhaps to put distance between them and the wark, perhaps because he wanted to prevent Benny from spilling any information Jack didn't want them to know. He gestured down the hallway. "Is it all the same?"

Benny grinned. "Probably still the same dust on the potted plants since you were here last."

"Long as they changed the sheets," Jack answered over his shoulder, and Benny laughed, his pupil-less eyes squeezing shut in amusement.

Lois glanced at her and consulted the tech. "It really is here," she assured Gwen. "Whatever it is."

Jack had reached the end of the hall and turned back to them, the beaded red curtain silhouetting him in his short coat and trousers. It was arresting, Gwen thought, almost as if she was seeing him for the first time sometimes, now that he didn't wear the coat. He could have picked up one any time, surely Lois could locate one for him, but he seemed content with short leather or denim jackets and button downs, t-shirts, trousers. Sometimes denims. Why she had ever thought he didn't wear them before was beyond her, but the first time she'd remarked on the denims he'd rolled his eyes like she expected Duncan would in about fourteen years or so and said, 'Jeez, Gwen, what, do you think I've never worn denims before?'

But here he was, older-looking-younger, looking freer, looking less like he was in control and more like he was following orders sometimes, just like he was supposed to be.

Maybe she was supposed to be wearing the long coat.

"Ladies, time is a-wasting," he chided.

Lois nodded her head and they walked down the hallway towards Cardiff's—and quite possibly Earth's--only alien whorehouse.

It was a bit of a let down in the overall ambiance: greenery, velvet and leather sofas, mismatched wooden tables for drinking or playing games. Gwen didn't know what she expected. Maybe crystal and champagne, or pleather and saloon doors, a honky-tonk piano, women in corsets and bustles.

Instead, the women, or men, or creatures were the most interesting things. Gwen counted at least three alien species that she recognised, a few very human-looking things that could have actually been people, and a few species that she didn't recognise. They milled about or talked to each other, playing cards or lounging semi-nude, waiting.

Most importantly, no blowfish. She was done with blowfish for a while. She couldn't even eat fish down at the local chippy. Just the smell made her irate, what with Lionel the pain in the arse being locked in a cell in holding and not spilling his guts, even if it had been two weeks. He just smiled, consulted with Maggie on tech every now and then, and asked for seasons of The Simpsons to watch on the portable DVD player Jack had mercifully dug up for him. Stockholm syndrome was going to officially set in any day now.

The largest represented group was the same gray-skinned females she'd worked with at Lady Luck. Jack had once remarked on them, but it had been in passing, because she couldn't for the life of her remember the name. There were a few green skinned blob looking things, and one thin white beanpole that could have been alive, but for the fact that it had no arms.

Just then someone, possibly another customer, took off his coat and hung it on the pole. Oh. Well. Okay then.

"It's not in this room," Lois whispered, but her eyes were riveted to one of the gray-skinned women, lounging on a sofa, half-asleep and wearing very very little. Her gray hair cascaded over her shoulders in big banana curls, and as she laid there, another woman wandered over and fell next to her on the sofa, curving into her, her hands running along her thighs. Maybe it was supposed to be sexual. Maybe it was a mild form of greeting. Maybe Gwen should stop watching.

One thing was for certain, she decided as Jack looked all around and sighed deeply, they would have had to drag Owen out of here kicking and screaming.

The most distinctive creature, a dark almost black-skinned, four-armed alien with four arms poured into a corset that was way too small for her, exited one of the rooms and shut the door behind her. Gwen could see a brass plaque on the door that might have read 'Office', but it was in a swirly cursive font that was hard to see in the light. The creature took one look at them and spread her arms.

"Oh, Harkness," the alien said, petting the leather of his coat shoulders. "Long time no…see."

Jack gave her a winning smile and removed her hand from his shoulder. "Madam Snazz, you look radiant."

Madam Snazz shrugged and waved three arms. "Oh you know, I'm getting plenty of UVB." The fourth hand twirled some of her curls about on one bejeweled finger. "What brings you here on such short notice?"

Jack shoved his hands in his denim pockets. "Yeah, we're here on business, actually. Seems you have something in your backrooms that's setting off some warning bells." He raised his eyebrows. "I would hate for things to become unpleasant."

Madam Snazz folded her hands together and frowned. "I remember when you were a lot more polite, Harkness."

Jack snorted. "I used to be a lot more of everything, if I recall correctly."

Gwen frowned and tried to figure out what was off about this whole thing. Jack tilted his head and looked at Snazz, his face still smiling and it wasn't fake. It was…

"Wait," she muttered, "hang on here. Jack, are you saying—"

"Madam and I go way back—"

"You actually _paid_ for it?"

The madam snorted and something smoke-like blew out her nose. "Oh, the captain never has to pay for it," she warbled, one of her hands going up to ruffle Jack's hair, and he let her, though his eyes flitted to Gwen and he tried too hard to school his face into one of consternation. "It's _always_ been a pleasure. Even taught me some things, back in the day."

Lois laughed, and when they all looked at her, she covered her mouth. "Oh, sorry."

Snazz turned back to Jack. "Really now, if you're onworld for a while, you're welcome any time." She turned her head and gave Gwen and Lois a look, that one that said something in her head wasn't thinking about tea and puppies. "Or if you want a foursome—" Her hands waved all at once in different directions. "I am more than happy to oblige."

Gwen rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. Lois shifted and waved the scanner about. "Yes, well, the signal is quite strong that way—"

Snazz sighed. "I told her that thing wasn't worth the trouble." She snapped her fingers on three hands and one of the drowsy women on the sofas jerked to her feet. "Kindly take our Torchwoodian protectors in the back to get the thing." Her face clouded, and that was partly because of the steam that she breathed out her nose again. "If Sal gives you trouble, you have permission to kill her."

"No, no," Jack said hastily, "no killing, Snazz." And he gave her a look. Oh _that_ look. The look of secrets. For a second Gwen felt herself start to seethe, and then she reminded herself about their need to know policy, and how it was hard to know what was need, and that Jack had a hundred years of things to sift through. She couldn't expect him to fork over everything all the time, or even remember it, in some cases.

Lois waved to the alien…woman? as she approached her. "Hullo, oh, yes, hi—" Lois froze when the woman's arms wrapped about her shoulders and she brought her mouth in for a kiss. Lois's arms curved about the woman's back and she patted her waist awkwardly.

Jack tilted his head. "Aw, Lois, you made a friend."

"Dor! She's not custom!" Snazz snapped, but Dor's arms just tightened and her mouth worked against Lois, whose eyes fluttered shut and her hands relaxed against the gray skin under her fingers.

Gwen cleared her throat, and Jack laughed. "Lois, Lois come back down to Earth, soldier."

Lois's eyes flew open and she extricated herself from Dor, who whispered something in her ear and then reached up to trail her fingers along Lois's jaw before smiling widely, showing two rows of very sharp teeth. It was a wonder she hadn't cut Lois's tongue with all the hockey they were playing for a second there. Dor ran those fingers over Lois shoulder, down her arm and to her hand, holding it as long as possible before letting go to saunter down the hall, where they were supposed to follow her.

"What'd she say?" Jack asked, taking Lois's elbow and walking down the hall in front of Gwen.

Lois glanced at him, and then behind her at Gwen. "I'd…I'd rather not say," she stammered.

Jack just patted her arm and barked another laugh, and they followed Dor down the hallway, and Gwen smiled at the man all but humping the first open doorway. He licked his fingers and ran them down his chest, and she had to turn away, because he smelled…well, she could smell him from here and it was like…it was like Jack times a million. Jack glanced at her over his shoulder and reached out for one of her hands.

"Anything to make a buck, these guys." He shook his head at the man. "If you need those bargain basement pheromones to get her in the door, then you're in the wrong line of work, honey."

The man rolled his eyes and Jack chuckled under his breath as he led Gwen away. It was a lot easier to concentrate after about a metre or so, and she glanced back to glare at the man. He smiled and gave her a little wave. "Isn't that illegal?" Lois asked.

"Everyone here is exchanging sex and money," Jack reminded her, nodding to a very thin…thing entirely wrapped in day-glo feather boas. "So I think you might have to re-evaluate that question." He put Gwen's arm in his other one, and they sort of sauntered down the hallway on either side of him. She bit down a combination of amusement and irritation; Jack was probably loving this.

Lois's gaze ran back to the very curvy and swaying gray bottom in front of them. Jack followed it, and he tilted his head, studying it as if it was a painting and he hadn't decided whether or not he was going to purchase it for his private collection. "Hrm."

Dor picked the next to the last door in the hall on the left, opening it and swinging the door inward before blinking sleepily at them. Gwen wondered if she was high. Hell, since she was an alien, she could have been hyperactive for her species and Gwen wouldn't have known. Jack glanced at Lois and mumbled something.

Lois tore her gaze away from the scanner in her hand, which apparently was not only very interesting, but it actually was providing some sort of reading. "What? Oh yeah. This way."

Gwen followed them in and knew by the disco ball that they were in for a treat. The man on the bed was tied up, but not naked. In fact, that was quite a lovely kilt he was sporting.

The armour, or rather the breastplate that the very large Sal was wearing was vaguely familiar. The rest of the outfit, from the little gladiator skirt to the cat-o-nine-tails she was using to make some impressive welts on the man was more costume. The breastplate was real. It stood out.

Sal stopped in mid swing and looked at them. "What do you want—oh, Harkness." Just the sound of his name coming from her mouth (all red, and that was definitely not from lipstick, her mouth was just red), sounded like butter on a hot welsh cake. Gwen rolled her eyes.

"Sal, my favorite gal," Jack said.

"Everyone here is his favorite gal, I wager," Lois muttered to her. Gwen snickered and glanced down the hallway, where a few heads had begun to poke out of doorways and in their direction. Gwen didn't fancy taking on a bunch of…whores and their paranoid clients, so she waved a hand and smiled.

"Just here for a thing," she said. "No bother."

Jack walked into the room, and they followed him. Well, Lois did. Gwen stayed in the doorway, because she actually wanted to keep an eye out for assailants in the hallway. "Sal, I think you have something we need."

Lois held up the scanner. "Yeah," she said apologetically, "your uhm, armour there."

Sal was less than amiable to the idea of giving up the breastplate.

A few minutes later and Jack had Sal hog-tied while Lois pried the breastplate off her. Gwen had taken up guard duty in the hallway, which had become remarkably vacant since the shouting had started, but was now beginning to show signs of life now that it was apparent that there hadn't been some sort of police raid.

Gwen studied the painting in front of her and wondered if it was even possible to do that position. Jack sidled up next to her and smiled. "Yeah, you can, if you're triple-jointed."

"Who's triple—oh."

Jack put an arm around her shoulder and swung her about, and down the hallway. "Lois is bagging the thing," he said. "And getting a phone number, I wager. Let's give her room."

Gwen rolled her eyes.

"PC Cooper," Jack drawled, "are we discovering your prudish side here?"

Gwen pulled out from under Jack's arm and tried not to make eye contact with a man…possible man creature hanging out of an open doorway. He looked human enough, except for the having two heads bit. Both heads looked like a young Brad Pitt. "I wouldn't say that. I just…I'm not that fond of prostitution."

"Oi, sweetheart, we could trigger both your G-spots," the man…thing said from the doorway.

Jack laughed. "Maybe some other time, Floyds."

"Harkness, you owe us a wrestle."

"I owe a lot of people a lot of things," Jack said light-heartedly, and they reached the end of the hallway and stood in the lobby, waiting for Lois. Gwen studied the pornographic figures woven into the carpet as Jack spoke something that sounded like French with a small alien about a foot tall, perched on the arm of the closest divan.

Lois ran out to them, her breathing heavy, eyes wide. "Double-headed Brad Pitt just asked me if I like triple reverse cowboy," she breathed, jogging up, arms full of armour in a cloth bag. "I'd very much like to go now."

As they walked to the door, what Gwen had thought was a very tall potted fern reached out and brushed Jack's head as he passed, running along his jaw, and he closed his eyes for a second. "Oooohhhhhhhh, Haaaaaaaarknessssssssssssssssssssss," she was sure she heard it breathe.

She was about to make some sort of scathing comment, but Jack reached up and extracted the plant from his face and neck, ran it along his lips—was that a dart of tongue?—as it slipped through his fingers; when he opened his eyes and caught her staring, he tried for a meek abashed smile, but his eyes were filled with something that didn't match.

Longing.

Jack didn't like waking up in the Hub because he didn't get to commute anywhere. That was what people did right? They commuted. They left their homes and they stopped off for a coffee or to put petrol in the car or…something. He could call himself a telecommuter but he wasn't working from home, he was living at work, and there was a sound difference. People didn't sleep under their desks at night. Well, most people didn't. Always had to factor in the few people who broke the rule, even if you didn't know they existed.

Nevertheless, sometimes he had a lie-in. For no reason. He wasn't in charge anymore, so he could just lie there and stare at Bogey on the wall and think about things, and if he was late, Gwen could dock him. She never would.

"I've been giving this thought," Ianto said, lounging beside him on the coverlet. He was in the suit. It was always the same suit. Jack had tried to undress him several times, but his brain just wouldn't go that extra mile and peel off the clothes. He couldn't see that expanse of skin one more time, and he wasn't sure whether or not it was because he didn't want to, or because he couldn't remember. Best not to dwell.

"Oh?" he said, putting his arms behind his head.

"Yes, and I think you should paint down here. Get someone in." Ianto wrinkled his nose. "There's nothing wrong with colour."

Jack bent his knees, rubbing the sides of his feet back and forth under the covers. It was a nervous habit, one he'd lost after he'd grown up, but somehow had picked up again in the last year or so. He remembered nights in his bed in Boeshane, the rhythmic sliding of his feet the only lulling to sleep in a world filled with intermittent terror.

"What colour do you have in mind?"

Ianto turned his head from contemplating the walls and now they were almost nose to nose. "Mauve."

Jack sighed. "Earth is the exception to that,"

"Not while you're on it."

He opened his mouth to reply, but his snooze alarm went off, and he rolled out of bed. When he looked behind him, no one was there. Not a big surprise.

The lights in Gwen's office were on when he shuffled out of his, and something opera was coming from the tech lab, so Maggie was in. But Lois's desk was still the smooth surface that marked the ends and starts of her days, and Dee's office was dark. She was off for the morning, something about girl bits. Gretchen, well, who knew with that one.

The coffee was made in the standard drip pot when he got there and it was hot and not cooked, so Gwen must have done it. Ianto's coffee machine, miraculously intact despite the explosion, was more of a showpiece, really.

A few weeks ago he'd waited until everyone had gone home, then got a pound of hideously expensive coffee, and tried to use the machine, despite what Lois had said about it being possessed. Or perhaps because of what Lois had said. Nothing had happened, except he'd ended up with grounds all over the floor and the worst cup of Turkish coffee he'd ever had.

"There's a trick to it," Ianto had always said. "I didn't even tell Owen."

"Well I didn't," Ianto said now, admiring the coffee machine with a secret smile. "I always did love having secrets."

Jack poured the auto drip and Ianto had the good sense to not say anything. "Didn't we all," Jack mumbled.

"Like now," Ianto told him, and Jack ignored him to get some milk from the fridge.

"Jack," Gwen called from the railing outside her office. "Good morning!"

He looked up at her and smiled. Gwen was always a welcome sight these days. She was alive and corporeal and not some ghost sticking around to drive him insane. Or some figment of his imagination, which was more disturbing than the ghost thing because that meant that the calls were coming from inside the house.

"Morning," he said brightly, but just keeping up the high-energy façade was tiring already. He didn't sleep nearly as much as a normal human did, but sometimes he just wanted to, and that translated into a dullness around the edges. He could have used another two hours of staring off into space.

Gwen joined him and filled her mug from the coffeepot. "Lois hasn't given up on the other machine," Gwen said. "She just hasn't managed to produce anything drinkable yet."

Jack turned so that he could lean against the counter. "Ah, well, if there's anyone with the tenacity to tame the wild coffee machine, it would be that one."

Gwen made a non-committal noise and threaded her arm through his. "Make that to go. Maggie has that thing down in the lab and we're supposed to come by."

Just thinking about last night caused something to hurt in his belly, though that could have been the coffee on an empty stomach.

"I've been thinking. It'd be too convenient, you know?" Gwen murmured as they walked down the hall. "If it's from the same suit as the gloves, right?"

Jack was wondering when she'd get to that thought. "Sal says she bought it at a rummage sale."

Gwen laughed. "Alien rummage sale?"

Jack glanced at her. "More like a swap meet. Torchwood usually sent someone, or if we had enough people, we'd go and confiscate everything. It's how we got the Belkadan scanner, actually." They rounded the corner and neared Maggie's door. She was oblivious to their approach, though, because she kept on singing along to the music. Maggie was a very bad Turandot.

"That would have been useful to know," Gwen said.

Jack felt that surge of guilt, then a surge of anger and resentment. He swallowed it with a mouthful of coffee. "Can't remember everything ahead of time, you know." And when she opened her mouth he cut her off. "Sometimes you don't know what to tell until the moment arises."

They stood in Maggie's doorway and stared at each other, and Maggie chose that moment to turn, belting out, " _Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte una_ aaahhhhhhhi there! How long have you been standing there?"

Jack spread his hands.

Maggie blinked and then turned. "Okay then," she started, turning down the opera with her remote and beginning her report as if they hadn't just got there. "Most of the metals registered on this thing are not of earth origin, except for the solid steel base." She glanced at them when they took up stations on either side of the table. "But come on, iron is one of the core elements in the universe, right?"

Jack didn't bother to argue.

"There are some records," she said, tapping the screen next to the workstation, "that indicate that the metal composition is identical, or very like, to those two gloves that you pulled up years ago." She blinked. "Or the one, anyway. You lot never scanned the second one, the one that…revived Dr. Harper."

"So it's from the same suit?"

Maggie shrugged. "Well they're made of the same thing, if that's what you want to hear. It could be. There could be five suits out there, and this one fits another suit. I dunno. But they were likely from the same place."

"What does it do?" Gwen asked, crossing her arms.

Maggie looked down at the breastplate. "Well, before a battle, you strapped it on, and it would protect your chest from swords and arrows and the like."

"With some sort of force field?"

One of Maggie's eyes widened and the other one narrowed. Jack hadn't understood that emoticon on the computer until this moment. "From being made of a metal," she said slowly. She looked down at the breastplate. "There is something, though, when you look at it under infrared—" She flicked her remote and the main lights went out. "Goggles," she said, nudging a box towards them and pulling her goggles up from around her neck to over her eyes.

Jack fished out a pair for himself and Gwen, pulling the strap over his head. Gwen just held hers up to her face.

The armour was still there, obviously, but it was black, like most metal was under infrared. Until Maggie flipped the breastplate over and showed them the inside. It lay there, like a curled up thing, obviously made for a man (Sal had tried to make it work, but bless her, on her frame it had literally been a breasts-plate only), except on the surface of the metal, a network of light purple lines, winding and squiggled all over the metal, like it had been engraved there.

Gwen took off her goggles and stared at the armour and then held them to her face again. Took them away, put them back. "What is that?"

Maggie bent over the designs and traced one with her finger. "Something that was embedded in the armour after the fact, I am guessing. Some other metal." She looked up at Jack, or at least her goggles turned towards him. "I haven't had time to take a sample, but I'm getting ready to record some images before I have a dekko." Her hand traced one of the longer lines and then one of the solid star-like images that dotted the design, about five or six of them. Almost like x's.

Like.

He bent down and turned the breastplate, examining the design from another view, and then turned it again for another angle. It was something, all right. Something had deliberately put this here, they had deliberately…

"What's it mean, d'you think?"

Jack turned the breastplate around and around on the table, staring at the lines and scribbles on the inside. "Ha." He looked up at them, and pointed at a convergence of lines in the far-left shoulder. "You are here."

Maggie peered at his finger. "It's a…?"

He felt that wild flutter in his belly that meant that adventure was afoot. "It's a map."

 

* * *

 

"I just can't believe I missed all the fun while I overslept. I feel as if I'm being punished. That's it. I'm setting the mobile alarm."

Dee snorted into the comm. "I was legs northward, how do you think I feel?"

Maggie glanced at Lois and they waved their torches in the cathedral. "Uh, Dee, you remember that Captain Harkness is on the comm now, right?"

"Trust me," Jack said casually into the comm, "I don't mind."

Gretchen laughed. "Just one of the girls, then, Jack?"

"A sheep in wolf's britches," Jack replied, voice distant, distracted.

Lois leaned against a wall of the crumbled cathedral, church, thingy, and regretted it immediately. It wasn't wet, it wasn't dirty, it was _slimy_. "Oh god, my hand is covered in slime," she said aloud, and Maggie shone her torch on her palm. It was indeed covered in something viscous and shiny.

Gretchen came up behind her and handed her a wipe. "Yeah, that's weevil marking. They make this slime by rubbing their—"

"I so don't want to know this," Dee said suddenly. "Really. There was a reason I was ill during bio-presentation day."

"My, my, Dee," Gwen said suddenly, and they all fell silent as if remembering that the boss was reading all their instant messages. "You're certainly confessional today."

"What if I said I had to go do something just now?" Dee asked.

Gwen made a clicking noise in her comm. "You got to stay at home, don't disappoint us now."

It was an odd arrangement, actually, and who knew why Gwen had done it, split herself and Jack into one team, and Gretchen, Lois and Maggie into another, leaving Dee back at the Hub, but sometimes she had her reasons, and sometimes she liked to upset routines so that they didn't settle into them too much. It was good, anyway, because if anyone got to stay 'home' it was usually Lois, and she wanted to go out. She wore her manky trainers and a pair of coveralls; she was geared to go.

By the time she'd woken up, it had been nine-fifteen, and Gwen had been more amused than anything else. Lois felt like doing the walk of shame into the office, but no one had actually cared. Gretchen still hadn't been in, and Dee was booked off. Maggie had been buried in her lab and hadn't known Lois had been late until later in the briefing.

But Jack had been sitting at her desk, making a mess of things (something about covering her order from Corporate Express on the phone. There were probably going to end up with fifty more boxes of paperclips than they would ever need), drinking coffee and sticking pencils behind his ears. Then in the morning briefing everyone had been brought up to speed on The Case of the Mysterious Treasure Map.

The map, when actually laid over Cardiff at a certain scale, pointed out several places marked with little stars. Jack and Gwen had decided that the items in question were more of the armour, based on that fact that one of the spots was out in the bay and the another was in an old church where Jack had located the second glove. So excitement had abounded as they'd loaded the shovels and pickaxes and mini GPS trackers and compasses into Twun and Twoo and jaunted off into the sunshine.

She and Gretchen and Maggie had followed their map to the coordinates they'd calculated and looked about, but nothing was to be found but a sewer access. Jack had mentioned that the last gauntlet had been surrounded by weevils, so Gretchen had armed them with spray and they'd gone down into the murky depths.

It might have once been a church, or a—Lois hesitated to call it a cathedral, but as they descended the staircase on the far end, the buttressed ceilings had revealed that it was a good fifty metres tall down here. That this was buried under Cardiff at all might have given Lois pause if Gwen hadn't pointed out the old Hub. It made one wonder what else was buried under the city, and more importantly who had put it there, and why it was no longer above the city.

Now, Maggie was trying to pinpoint the location of their mystery treasure, and Gretchen and Lois were supposed to be on the look out for weevils. Instead, they all seemed to be preoccupied keeping each other company on the comms.

"You think you guys have it bad," Jack remarked lightly, "I think we might very well be at the dump. The town dump of Cardiff."

"It's a junkyard," Gwen said.

"You don't put biomedical waste at a junkyard." Jack must have kicked something because Gwen made disapproving noises. "I thought dumps were mythical."

"Well, there can't be that many of them left," Gretchen said, "what with recycling and all."

Dee snorted. "Oh how little you understand the nature of human waste creation, Gretchen."

"Dee, what are you doing anyway?" Gwen asked.

There was a clicking noise. "Well, after I finish painting my nails, I'm going to investigate this piece of armour. Then I was thinking of having lunch. Or a facial."

Lois's stomach rumbled and she remembered one of the things she liked about staying back at the Hub.

"Har har, really. Oop, Jack, what are you doin—oh holy god, run for it!" Gwen's comm went silent as she ran. They could hear her heavy breathing, and Jack's panting as they must have run across the dump.

Lois paused. "Ma'am?" Dee said seconds later.

"Whee, vuls," Gwen panted, obviously still in mid-flight. "Go up, up up up up." And then it sounded as if they set about doing just that, climbing some metal stairs, and then there was the definite sound of a gun going off, and then punching and the low rumble of what was probably angry weevil roaring.

"Everyone all right? Dee said after a few seconds of silence.

"Fine, fine. The Constable and I are handling the local drunks." Jack grunted. "Hostile. Almost more hostile than normal."

"D'you think it's because we're close to the…the spot?" Gwen said, still a little out of breath.

Lois ignored them for a second and concentrated on the area she was in. She didn't want to be so focused on their conversation that she missed the telltale signs of weevils around her. Gretchen swept one of the darker areas with her torch and sighed.

"This place is huge. How are we going to find it?"

Maggie glanced up from the readout of the map. "Metal detectors."

"Oh? For real?"

"Yup."

"Bugger."

"Verily and yea." Maggie returned her attention to her map, hefting the pack on her back.

There were a few minutes of silence, as they followed Maggie through an almost labyrinthine course, what with all the fallen stone and general rubble of the area.

"I always thought that because the weevils were involved in the second gauntlet, they must have had something to do with its creation," Gwen posited into the comm.

Jack snorted and Lois smiled to herself. "Could you see Janet loose at a forge?" A pause. "Well, I could, but not in the good, sword-making way."

Gwen started to say something, but to Lois it sounded like, "You're just _brrrrzakt_ ing that be _shrzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzkt_ shenanigans with Ianto."

"Well," Jack said, "there was that onskreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee--" and Lois had to turn her comm volume down.

"We out of range?" she guessed.

Maggie took her comm off and tucked it in her pocket. "Yup. All this, and we're pretty far underground."

Gretchen put both of her hands on the small of her back underneath her rucksack and bent back. "Oh man, I should have taken drugs."

Maggie waved her hand, indicating that they follow her. "It looks like we're almost exactly on the spot where we could begin to look…" She glanced up in front of her and her words died on her lips. "Or we could go to plan B."

Lois stared off into the darkness over Maggie's shoulder at the group of weevils slowly inching in their direction. "Oh dear."

Gretchen slid her pack from her shoulders, and it occurred to Lois that she had better do the same, but she kept a loose grip on one strap in case she could use it as a cudgel. Anything was a weapon, actually. That was a Dee lesson.

"Three on this side," Gretchen said lightly. She'd once told them in weevil 101 that light tones worked with Weevils in the reactionary way. They sooner they started shouting and moving quickly, the sooner the situation would escalate. Time could be a weapon, as well. That wasn't just a Dee lesson.

Lois looked to her left. "Two over here."

"Eight total then," Maggie said softly, lowering the tech. Some things shouldn't be used as weapons until last resort, and irreplaceable tech was one of them. "How do we want to do this? I have to hold this, but I have spray."

Lois grabbed her own spray. They all had firearms, but weevils didn't always react well to them. Plus, weevils were in the 'do not kill unless necessary' list. It might get a hell of a lot necessary. Maggie's torch was mounted on her hat, but Gretchen and Lois held theirs.

"Wait a minute," Gretchen said. "Lois, light the glowsticks."

Oh, she'd forgot about those. She slowly groped for them in her pockets whilst keeping an eye on the weevils far ahead of Maggie and the ones to her left creeping closer, their low rumbling not irate yet, but on the prowl, most definitely. She twisted the ends and the four glow rods lit up the place. She had to squint for a second, and in that moment the weevils hesitated. Depending on how long they'd been down here, that could have been painful.

"Now what?" she asked. Now she didn't have any free hands. Maggie raised her spray in front of her.

Gretchen reached into her cargo pockets and pulled out two of the orange-tipped airsoft guns they used to administer retcon by dart. "You know who you want on your team when you're dealing with weevils?" she said as she aimed the guns, one in each hand, at two separate weevils and fired. "The vet with the tranq guns." The darts hit them square in the chests and they ran for another two seconds before falling forward on their faces. Gretchen aimed at two more in opposite directions and fired again, taking out two more weevils. Lois had to admit this was pretty amazing.

Gretchen aimed twice more and took out the remaining four weevils and then blew on the barrels of her guns needlessly before turning to them with a smile and raising her hands up over her head and waving them. "Whose house? Run's house," she sing-songed. "Whose house?"

Lois smiled when Gretchen pointed at her. "Run's house."

Maggie caught her breath, the tech clutched to her chest, eyes wide. "I'll never get used to this," she whispered.

Lois patted her back. But her hands were shaking. Gretchen took three tries to get one of the guns back into her pocket. "It's all right. Let's get this thing and get out of here."

It turned out that they didn't have to dig for anything. Maggie led them to a wall directly at the coordinates and they poked at it for a while, but it was scratched up, as if inexpert hands had removed stones and then replaced them, not once or twice, but many times. Maggie pulled a crowbar from Lois's pack, and they took turns guarding and tugging, digging the end into the stone and working it loose.

In the end, it took all three of them yanking on the edges and corners to pull the stone from the wall, and then a moment of confusion as they all jumped clear when it fell to the floor with a thud that made them all freeze. With any luck, all of the weevils that were down here to hear that were all unconscious. If not, then they were in trouble.

Maggie peeked into the hole they'd made, the light from her helmet illuminating the space. Lois joined her, and blinked. "Oh, snap."

 

* * *

 

Maggie held up the helm and showed it to them. "We got a shiny hat. You?"

Jack glanced at Gwen, who made a face a nd toweled her hair as she sat in her chair. Jack handed Maggie the rubbish bag they'd dumped their find in. "Don't open that here," he said, and when she glanced at him sceptically, he raised his brows. "Seriously. We had to Dumpster dive to get it, and I think the Dumpster was filled with all the takeaway from every Thai restaurant in Cardiff in 2008." He shuddered. "I might have recognised a carton of half-eaten pad Thai."

Gwen tossed the towel on her desk and ran out suddenly, hand over her mouth.

Jack watched her go. Surely there wasn't anything left in Gwen's stomach. There wasn't anything in his, but he was still feeling a little ill.

Some things man was not meant to smell.

Maggie nodded and held the sack out in front of her as she preceded Jack down the stairs to the atrium floor. Jack stuffed his hands in his pockets and followed her, the breeze from the HVAC chilling the back of his neck. His hair was wet and combed, and a trickle of water chose that moment to run behind his ear.

After their brief unromantic interlude with the weevil welcoming party, things hadn't begun to look up. They'd located their buried treasure, but they'd truly had to dive for it, digging through piles of rotting rubbish bags that animals had ripped open and strewn about. He was sure that at one point they had stumbled away from food and into medical waste. Gwen had booted about five minutes in, and he hadn't lasted much longer.

In the end, they'd located the long wooden box, now rotted away in places and infiltrated by a colony of cockroaches, real ones and not some sort of alien roaches, and Gwen had lost it again. Jack had yanked the armour pieces out of the box, some sort of leg and arm plates but no boots, and then they had climbed back to the SUV and worked out how to get home without making the vehicle smell like they currently did. The solution had been to strip and wear the spare scrubs home, Gwen in the top, Jack in the bottoms. They'd stuffed all their things in a rubbish bag, but that was just so they could search the pockets before throwing them away. He'd driven barefoot, Gwen in the passenger's seat with her head out the window.

He didn't even have the heart to make a joke about Torchwood and its glamorous lifestyle. He bet even their guns would smell after this.

They'd sorted things and then gone straight to the showers. And how depressing was it that they weren't communal anymore?

Then he'd heard Gwen retching in her stall and decided that he didn't mind.

Then he'd found noodles behind his ear, and he joined her.

All things said, team B had done much better, taking out eight weevils (Gretchen might have exaggerated, but Lois wouldn't have) and then recovering their artefact, which, as Maggie had just showed him, was yet another piece of armour.

"If it's all metal, I might just put it in the autoclave," Maggie said over her shoulder.

Jack shrugged. "I dunno, there are straps, but they're not metal. Leather, maybe."

Maggie sighed. "I'll get a hazmat suit."

Lois looked up from her desk. Spray the inside of the mask with Febreeze," she said, "trust me."

Maggie gave them a thumbs up and walked down the hallway to the lab, already humming under her breath. Jack watched her go, and realised for the first time that she was Toshiko's replacement. Of course he'd known that, but somehow in his head, he'd been thinking of her as a temp. Maggie wasn't a temp. She was what they had, and strangely it wasn't bad. Maggie wasn't anything like Toshiko most of the time. Sure the tech was going to have certain personality qualities that would probably always be consistent, or at least they felt the same.

Once in the war, his first war, he'd been in a company with a tech, wiring explosives to infested orbital outposts. Zev wasn't anything like Toshiko or Maggie or any of the other Torchwood techs Jack had known throughout the years, but he'd still had –would still have, if he thought about it—that gleam in his eye, that one of knowing. There wasn't a word for it. Not then, and not now.

Lois stood and stretched. "Coffee?" she asked him, and he took in her short frame, smile and plaits, fast efficient hummingbird movements and realised that while some things were the same in everyone, very essential parts were different, and that was blessing.

"Nah," he said, waving a hand. "Have you seen Dee?"

"Range," Lois said as she waked past him and into the kitchenette. Jack had wondered why they hadn't made a separate room for the kitchenette instead of part of the atrium, but as he watched Lois rummage about in the fridge for celery and cheese, he suspected that he had his answer. "Something about ballistics testing that breastplate."

Oh, that wasn't good.

Jack hurried to range but tried not to make it look as if he was hurrying. He'd been thinking of making a trip to the pub to see Faith, but that would have to wait until he'd saved the breastplate from certain annihilation down in the lower levels.

Oh come on, he thought, Dee was more responsible than that.

"You know what I like about Dee?" Ianto said, as he strolled next to him, hands clasped behind his back. "She's so practical, but sometimes she just snaps and has one of these moments of total crazy."

Jack wagged a finger at him, but said nothing. Ianto widened his eyes, ran a finger zipper over his mouth and mimed throwing away the key.

"Seriously," Jack said to Ianto as if he was actually a person. "None of your lip."

Ianto pulled an imaginary something from his pocket, unlocked the corner of his mouth, unzipped his lips and said, "All right." Then he zipped his mouth again and pocketed nothing.

The irony of something imaginary imagining things itself was not lost on Jack. He just didn't want to think about it. Much.

The range was well below ground, and Jack liked it a whole hell of a lot better and a little less than the old range, depending on his nostalgia level at any given moment. Right now he was just glad that he could find it. The TARDIS had a range (wonder of wonders) and it had taken him five tries to find it, and once he had, he'd never found it again. Bah, the Doctor giveth, and he taketh away, what else was new?

Gwen was already there with Dee, the two of them standing at a table with a serious amount of firepower. Jack looked downrange to see what they were firing at, and he raised his eyebrows. "Is that wise?"

Dee snorted. "It's indestructible."

"Really? What did Mags say it was made of? Steel? Other trace elements?" He shook his head sceptically. "I don't know if I would—"

"All right, check this out," Dee said, raising the gun on the table, and Jack could feel his eyes dry out as they widened.

"Hey, that's my—"

Dee fired the big gun down the range, and it hit the breastplate. The report itself was quiet, but when the beam hit the target, there was a massive _wuh-boom!_ , and a billow of smoke as the target, breastplate, stand, everything in a five-foot radius blasted apart. When the smoke cleared, Dee set the gun down on the table again and stalked down the range.

Jack reached out and felt the gun. "This isn't my gun," he said.

Gwen nodded. "Correct. Dee liberated it from UNIT. They picked it off the street after that whole dalek thing."

"I can't believe you let her use the big gun," he complained, watching Dee kick about in the wreckage. Part of him was a bit concerned that they had just obliterated the map to the rest of the armour.

Gwen rolled her eyes. "Oh Jack."

"This is what I mean," Dee called, walking towards them, the breastplate very intact in her hands. "Indestructible."  
She turned it over. "Not even any scoring or soot from the impact. No scuffs or marks from being blown across the room. Not a scratch." She handed it to Gwen. "It's not even hot."

Gwen took it gingerly and then more firmly as the weight of it hit her and she realised that Dee was right, and it wasn't hot. Jack let his fingers trail down the planes of the big gun. Yeah, yeah, armour indestructible. This was the big gun.

"Jack, stop manhandling the weaponry and offer an opinion on this." Gwen's voice was firm, but her eyes sparkled with amusement. He snatched his hand away and shoved it in his trouser pocket.

"Uhm, yeah, the thing is indestructible."

Gwen turned to Dee. "This is why we keep him around. We might have missed that."

Dee tapped on the breastplate with one finger. "I don't know why I didn't think of that." Than she added. "Maybe Maggie should run it through some tests. Latent abilities hidden under the steel?"

Jack cocked his head and jogged his memory around the tracks. "The steel would have burnt away under that blast and shown us the thing underneath. There was this rumour when I was stationed—well, okay, whatever, the rumor had it that some people had developed a chameleon material for weapons and armour that would get them past certain kinds of scanners looking for things." He shrugged. "I never thought it was very likely. Why would you want to disguise something as steel or titanium? Why not ceramic or daisies?"

"The daisy gun," Dee said, "I saw that one in The Godfather."

"Ha ha," Jack told her, finally reaching out to place the flat of his palm on the armour, right over where the heart would be. "Still, Maggie should run it through every filter we have, combinations of them, even. She might want to set up down here, just in case."

Gwen turned with the breastplate in her arms. "I'll take it up. Dee, come on. Maybe you can help her with the munitions." Jack watched them go, but didn't move. Dee raised her eyebrows at him.

"Oh no, I'll be a tick," he said.

Dee rolled her eyes and followed Gwen, but from the hallway he could hear Gwen say to her. "We don't want to stay for the reunion. It's strangely sexual."

Jack smiled and turned back to the big gun. "Why hi there," he said, running one fingertip down the side of the matte finish. "I'm Captain Jack Harkness. Who might you be?" He flipped the switch on it to begin charging and was rewarded with the high pitched whine of the pulsar. "Oh, that's lovely."

The targets Dee had set up meters and meters down the range were still partially up, and he put the strap over his shoulder and hefted the big gun up, grasping the top bar and settling the round length of it partially against his side, partially over his pelvic bone. The machinery whistled near readiness and thrummed just a little against his muscles and he shivered when he brought it about and downrange. "You are gorgeous. Now let's just see if you can, ah!" He found the auto aim function and decided to give it a try. Sometimes it was okay to let the machine do the work for you.

The gun trilled like it had under Dee's hands, and he imagined her fingers closing on the trigger, those callous slender pads, perhaps the fingers of other people, all settling the gun into their bodies, slotting into place like an extension of themselves, even as his own finger slid along that metal, shiny with use, and he squeezed—

The gun released itself with that tell tale silence, and recoiled back against him, making his hips move in a rhythm he missed for more than one reason. He grunted with the surprise of it—it had been a while—and the plasma burst out downrange, _wuh-boom!_ , obliterating the target completely. The gun cycled again, faster than the first time, a better refractory period than he had, then, and he aimed again, taking the gun in its paces a few more times, a few more targets.

The gun hummed in his hand, and the end was starting to set off the heat sensor on the readout under his grip, so he lowered it to the table and powered it down, fingers still exploring a few features and construction points that hadn't been on his old one. This one was a different series entirely, not just a different model. He smiled at it and then downrange at the smoking remains of a few straw men.

"That was fantastic," he said aloud.

No one answered him, and he knew that if he wondered about it too long _he'd_ come and offer comment, so he reached for the cleaning cloths and began to break the weapon down, dismantling it to keep the lenses clear and to get a better look at the things that made her tick.

The big guns were testy, which was why they weren't practical. Only the Sontarans thought they were shite-hot, and really, _Sontarans_. His old gun had required vigilant maintenance, but his new one would be better. Not the one that Dee had liberated, but the spare parts one they'd always had in the Hub armoury, and now that he had this one, slightly different from the one he'd left on the TARDIS, he could actually make another whole one, using different parts and power sources. He'd been collecting bits and bobs from the armoury in a cardboard box in the corner, a side project, but he'd been working from memory. This was a whole new opportunity.

Jack dragged the whole mess back to his office and sat down at his desk, a box of parts and the gun, powered down, sitting in front of him like the most beautiful thing he'd seen in weeks.

It was peaceful, working on weapons, fixing tech from another place, another time. He'd never be able to do what Maggie did, and he left the earth weaponry to Dee, but there were some things that yanked him right back in time to another place in the universe, another time in the universe, a place where he used to be from, a place where he used to belong. These metals were familiar, these little circuit boards, these painted copper wires, these interlocking components and traces of a universal language that wouldn't be invented for a thousand years but which he would speak some day. Would speak one day again, that was.

By the time he looked up from the calibrations on the big guns, his watch read six-thirty. At some point in time Dee had left, and Gwen had murmured a soft goodnight in his ear, and he'd waved them off. His stomach was empty, and he'd gone as far as he could. Rushing gun construction was a bad idea, and so he packed everything away in a few boxes, laid the assembled gun on the sofa in his office, and went in search of something edible.

Just…not Asian, he thought, trying very hard not to think of rotten lo mein.

Ah, look there. Bread, butter in a tub and fresh carrots. Lois bought him things, he knew it was her, since he never made a shopping list but she did for the Hub in general. He was salaried, technically he could do his own shopping and use the fridge for whatever he wanted—indeed everyone else seemed to only use the top shelf and had designated the rest of them as his—but Lois always seemed to get him things, and he found that he didn't have to go to the shops unless he wanted take-away. If he thanked her, she'd say it was part of her job, even though they knew otherwise.

Before he closed the door, he spied the pack of American pudding cups, and her careful handwriting on the cardboard: _Jack's_.

Mmm, pudding.

Dinner was spartan and indulgent in turns, using the carrots to scoop the pudding from the cups, reading a pulp novel with a cracked spine at the desk, now cleared of parts, just a small pile of paper work. He thought about finishing it, maybe going out for a walk, going to a film, going to that jazz club and listening to the singer there do her best Billie impression.

He was just adding a few more signatures to his typed reports when Ianto sauntered in from god knows where and flopped down in the chair in front of Jack's desk. He looked over at the gun on the side. "I thought you said that size doesn't matter, Jack."

"That joke's older than me," Jack replied.

"Hmmm." Ianto cocked his head. "You know," he said dryly, "when I told you that gloves came in pairs, I was being droll." He smiled. "I should have given thought to the fact that gauntlets come from suits of armour."

Jack shook his head. "I never actually thought about it. I'm sure you'd have a good name for it by now. Let's hear it."

Ianto was silent. Of course.

"On the other hand, it doesn't raise the dead," Ianto said. "Pity."

Jack glanced up then. "You think?"

"You once asked me if I'd have used the gauntlet, on Lisa—"

"Yeah, I remember." Jack dumped the last of his paperwork in his outbox and smoothed his empty blotter with his hands. It was nice, clean. If he tried he could feel the indentations from where his pen had pressed on it. "Then you demonstrated the use of a stopwatch in conjunction with men's fashions."

"Yes, well." Ianto crossed his ankles and put his hands behind his head. "So it's my turn. Would you have—"

"No." Jack knitted his brows. "We saw, with Owen. That was a mistake."

"Let me finish," Ianto said, leaning forward, lowering his hands so that they were flat on the desk, opposite Jack's. "If you had access to _different, better_ technology—"

"No." Jack closed his eyes. Ianto wasn't there; he wasn't a moron, so he didn't have to look at him. There was silence and he didn't bother to open his eyes, because the silence was almost like a barrier, a shield that kept him safe from his own brain. "Nothing comes back from the dead without a price. A price you usually don't know about until it's too late."

"Except you," Ianto said finally, and when Jack opened his eyes to look at him, he was gone.

 

* * *

 

It was already afternoon before Gwen got to the tech lab, and Maggie was in the middle of strapping one of the leg plates to a large wicker frame. She'd already attached the breastplate and one of the arm plates, and it looked like some uneven remnant from a Mel Gibson period piece. The helm was a sinister severed head sitting on the table. Gwen reached out and turned it to face away from her.

"Gretchen and Lois will be here in a tick," she said, "Sam and Dean are flipping out."

Maggie glanced up from the buckles and strapping. "Oh, hullo. I think we should name him."

Gwen stopped for a moment to consider that she had never mentioned Ianto's habit of naming tech, but Maggie had instinctively thought of it anyway. This had to be something human, not unlike naming boats and cars.

"The HMS Knight?" she suggested. She was rubbish at naming things.

Maggie thought for a second. "I was thinking, 'Brad'. Possibly 'Domo Arrigato Mister Roboto'."

Gwen wasn't ready to give up, or spend the rest of the case referring to the armor as DAMR. "Great Plate?"

Maggie cocked her head. "Super Suit. You've Got Alien Chainmail." She smiled. "Clovis."

Gwen nodded. "Right. Any closer to finding out what any of it does?

Maggie waved her hands and picked up the other leg plate. "Oh my yes. It's brilliant, actually." She waved the leg plate, which was actually a plate that covered the thigh, loosely connected to a shin guard. The arms were rather the same—plate for the upper arm, and then one for the forearm. Gwen was sure that there was probably a fancy name for all of this, but she didn't care to ask. Maggie would probably tell her anyway.

"This is called a cuisse," she said tapping the thigh plate, and this is a greave." She hit the lower plate with her knee. "This," and here she touched the upper arm and shoulder plate, "is a rerebrace and that is a vambrace."

Obviously, Gwen thought.

Maggie knelt and began to buckle the cuisse on to the dummy. "There are other terms depending on the kind of armour, and there's a bunch of bits and bobs that might go in between or underneath, but this is the bare bones suit of armour, actually." She finished a buckle and sat back to arch her back. "The gauntlets are obviously gone, and we don't have any boots, but if we had some chain or a jerkin we could suit someone up in this."

Gwen felt her face stiffen. "Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea."

Maggie shrugged. "Same here." She resumed putting on the greave and continued talking. "Based on all the tests I ran, Dee was right that breastplate is indestructible, and Jack was right as well--it's not iron, or steel. It's something else." Gwen didn't even bother to ask, because if Maggie had known what it was, she would have said so. "It's all made from the same stuff, _except_ …"

Maggie finished buckling on the greave and pushed herself to standing. "Based on the readings of what the gloves did when they animated the dead, including the extended events around Dr. Harper and…Ms. Costello, the gloves required an energy source to work, and they would take it from the holder if they couldn't get it elsewhere."

"Elsewhere?"

Maggie tapped the second vambrace and slipped it off the counter with its upper counterpart. "Right. From these—" she shook the plates in her hand, "and these." She tapped one of the greaves with her toe. "The leg and arm plates are made of more conductive metal than the rest. The gloves, the helm, the breastplate." My guess is that they store up kinetic energy from the wearer, and that's used to power the rest of the armour." She paused, lost in thought. "If we're trying to explain how it would work on a human body. If the intended wearer is alien in nature, who knows how the armour works for them."

Gwen watched Maggie buckle on the second arm braces and worried her lower lip between her teeth. The armour made her nervous, justifiably.

Maggie didn't see her face, so she just kept going, and maybe that was for the best. "Anyway, I've been thinking that maybe you never actually got to see the intended purpose of the gloves," she rambled. "I mean, humans using a piece of alien tech not intended for them, with a power source that it wasn't meant to use is like getting a secondary use out of a prescription drug." She shrugged. "Wellbutrin was an antidepressant, but they use it for smoking cessation." She looked at Gwen then, patting the last buckle. "Maybe we've only seen the smoking cessation part of the armour."

Gwen shook her head. "Well, with no clue as to who this belongs to, it's not looking to get any clearer."

Maggie dusted her hands and cocked her head, eyes running over the armour. "Brian and I made leather armour like this, but metal plate is expensive, and a lot of places won't let you fight in it." She ran one finger down the closest vambrace. "This is utilitarian and dangerous. Look at those spikes," she said, her hand sliding down a row of one-inch spikes that lined the metal across the mid-forearm. Those are made to—" she reached up and started to backhand Gwen, but where the back of her hand should have hit Gwen's face, her forearm stopped just there. If she had been wearing the armour, it was clear that the spikes would have ripped through flesh. "Nasty work."

"In light of everything," Gwen said suddenly, as the thought occurred to her, "I don't think it's a good idea for you to spend too much time with this alone." She crossed her arms, and Maggie considered it, turning the helm in her hands on the counter.

"You're probably right. We don't know what happened last time, and I don't fancy going bonkers for some space armour." They had a moment of silence, and then Maggie sighed. "What was that earlier about the pittins?"

"Sam and Dean are crawling the walls," Gwen murmured, looking at the scrollwork on the surface of the breastplate. "Gretchen is looking at them."

"Isn't that their job?" Maggie asked, distracted. "I mean, most of what they live in involves climbing."

Gwen reached out with one hand and touched the breastplate. Nothing happened. "I keep expecting it to zap me or something."

Maggie rechecked the buckles that connected the cuisses to the greaves and glanced up. "It's inert, Boss. I promise."

Gwen tucked her hand under her armpit. "Yeah, I heard that before."

Maggie looked about to say something, but they heard noises from the hallway, thunking boots and the general rustling of clothing. Something hit one of the walls, and there was a crinkling of a rubbish liner. Maggie stepped back from the armour and stared at it, ignoring the approach of who had to be Jack and Dee.

Gwen was right. They clomped into the room, looking dusty and exhausted. Or rather, Dee did. "I will never do that for you again," she said, tossing the bag on the table. "Ever. Never ever."

Jack followed her into the lab, grinning. "That's a James Bond film, isn't it? 'Ever Never Ever' starring Roger Daltrey."

Gwen narrowed her eyes. "Who?"

Jack smiled. "Precisely."

Dee sat down on the only stool left in the lab and seemed to collapse in on herself. It wasn't like Dee to slouch, let alone sag, so she must have been upset or tired. Gwen watched her lean down to unlace her boots. "I think I torqued it, seriously." She muttered. "I hate these sodding boots anyway—ah!" she managed to pull the boot off and a rain of something fell out of it onto the floor. It looked like oats or something.

Maggie looked up from her display and frowned. "This is a clean lab, Dee."

Jack shook the bag Dee had thrown on the counter and Gwen could hear the metal clanking noise. Surely there couldn't be much more armour for this thing, and they knew that the gloves were gone (if this was the same armour; that was not a comforting thought)

"Oh Mags, go easy on her. She waded through a grain silo to get these for you."

Maggie approached the bag and opened it, peering inside. "Are these even my size?" she asked, pulling out one metal boot, made of welded plates but which, when Maggie turned in her hand, obviously had no bottom.

Jack leant against the counter and smiled. "Yeah, that's not gonna keep the water out," he joked.

"They're called sabatons," Maggie said breathlessly, and they sort of fit like…" she pulled the other one out and knelt by the dummy, fitting the boots onto the legs so that they touched the sides of the greaves just slightly. "Like that."

Dee rubbed her foot and peered at the armour, still obviously irritated. "So it's a full suit of armour," she offered. "What does this all mean?"

Gwen shifted from one foot to the other and asked that question herself. This armour, just one piece of it, had driven one member for Torchwood off the deep end. Jack had insisted later that Suzie hadn't been batshit when he'd hired, her, and Gwen was willing to believe him on that count. Suzie's reports and notes before the armour had been rather sane. But she had already been planning her retcon thing, so that wasn't very convincing.

Stumbling on that gauntlet and realising what it could do must have been some sort of miracle from heaven once Suzie had sussed it. As if it had been preordained. Or destined, or as if it had sensed what Suzie wanted, what she _needed_.

No. She'd entertain paranoid fantastical delusions later. Right now, Dee was standing and limping out the doorway. "I'm going to shower and get a wrap for my ankle," she said, "if anyone cares."

Jack winked at her and turned to Gwen. "I think I got pictures. She was swimming in the grain, no joke."

Dee threw her shoe and it hit him in the arm. "You're a twat." And then she disappeared down the hall.

Jack picked up the shoe and sniffed it, then made a face. "I think she did sprain something," he offered. "I should get her a thank you gift."

Gwen raised a brow and stared at the empty doorway. "Just don't make her shoot you. I told her I'd kill her if she mutinied. That really shouldn't be your fault."

Jack raised his hands and his eyebrows at the same time. "Oh she loves it. Deep down, she loves it."

Gwen rolled her eyes. Whatever Jack and Dee had going on was their business, and it wasn't a hundred percent friendly, but it had an edge of camaraderie to it that was probably borne out of mutual violence. But she turned towards the armour and gave Jack a brief update on what Maggie had found. It was only two sentences long, so it wasn't as if there was a whole lot to tell.

"So, do we have it all?" he asked. "We went to all the places on the map." They both sat on stools and watched Maggie make last adjustments to the armour, tilting it on the dummy better, tightening it so that it didn't fall, occasionally fastening the leg or arm plates to other places with leather straps and buckles.

"Does it bother you how easy it was to find all this?" she asked him, and he opened his mouth to reply, but Maggie lifted the helm and turned to them.

"Last bit." She turned back to the dummy, hefted the helm, and fitted it on the stand at the top. "And it's Voltron."

And then she disappeared.

"Whoa," Jack said, uncrossing his arms.

"What?" Maggie's voice said, and then she reappeared where she'd been standing, hands in the air. "Did I just disappear?"

"You did indeed," Gwen said moving forward. "You'd make me more comfortable if you—"

Maggie turned towards her, face slightly green.

"Mags?" Behind her, Gwen heard the scrape of Jack's stool legs.

Maggie tilted her head. "I would—"

And then she vomited, falling to the ground, already unconscious.

"Shit shit shit shit," Gwen said, falling to her knees and yanking Maggie up by the shoulders, while the woman choked on the vomit in her throat. Jack skidded to Maggie's other side and turned her towards him, reaching in with his fingers and scraping a pile of vomit from her mouth.

He glanced at Gwen. "Get Gretch," he said quickly, and Maggie coughed and retched again, this time bringing nothing up. Jack's fingers ran across her chin and cheek and brow, then he pressed his lips to her forehead. "Get Gretchen."

Gwen couldn't be arsed to figure out the comms from Maggie's desk; she hit the ground in the hallway, screaming. It wasn't as if she had to go far, down the hallway. Gretchen was still in the main atrium with Lois, fretting over the pittins, and when Gwen rounded the corner, they dropped the creatures back into their cages.

"Mags just—bring your kit," she blurted, and ran to the med bay to grab one of the emergency medical bags they packed to take into the field.

Gretchen darted behind her to snag a few more things. "What's wrong with her?"

"She was fine," Gwen said, "and then she vomited and just fell down. She's breathing, but—"

"Okay," Gretchen said, and Gwen barely had time to notice that she'd slipped off her heels and replaced them with a pair of those hideously ugly foam clogs in a few second's time. "It's going to be okay," she murmured as they left the med bay, though whether that was to Gwen or herself was up for grabs. Lois moved to follow them, and Gretchen held up a hand as she walked down the tech corridor. "Stay here, Lo, until we can isolate the cause. If it's something contagious, we'll need someone who isn't contaminated."

Gwen hadn't even thought of that.

When they got back to the lab, Jack had Maggie on her side and had wiped the vomit from her face, though it was in her hair and would be until the poor thing could bathe. He'd opened a few buttons on her blouse and slipped off her long-sleeved lab coat, probably in anticipation of Gretchen needing access to the naked arms.

Gretchen waved to the counters. "Get the kit open, and if she's stable, you might as well move her up here so that we can work."

Jack lifted Maggie and clambered up to standing. "And get away from this stuff," he said, nodding his head at the suit.

Gretchen glanced at the armour on the stand. "What did she do?" she asked as they laid her out on a cleared worktable. She checked Maggie's pulse and breath. "I'm putting in a peripheral line and starting some saline, but that doesn't help figure out what's wrong with her," Gretchen said, digging in her bag and fishing out plastic wrapped implements. "Explain."

"She touched the armour and disappeared, and then she reappeared, vomited and passed out," Jack said succinctly.

Gretchen patted Maggie's arm and lined up the needle. "Mags, you have great veins," she whispered. Gwen watched her slip in the needle and place the IV without any hesitation. She'd been doing it as a vet as well, so this was probably the easy part. "All this from the armour?"

Jack ran his thumb along Maggie's hairline, then dug his fingers into her hair, and Gwen knew he was feeling for lumps from her collapse to the ground. "Yeah, nothing but trouble, that stuff."

Gwen resisted the urge to say that they should have been more careful, but that should have been her responsibility, not his, and she hadn't done it. She wasn't the only one who knew how dangerous the armour was, but she was the one in charge and she hadn't thought of—"

"Should we take her to hospital?"

Gretchen hung the bag of saline on the makeshift pole Jack had pulled together –they should get a proper one from the med bay, hell, they should move Maggie to the med bay. Oh god, this was the first time they would have to use the med bay for actual human medicine.

"Normally I'd say yes, get her the hell out of here," Jack said, "but what if it has something to do with that?" He nodded his head toward the armour. "Should we take it with us?"

Gwen shook her head. "I don't think it's a good idea to expose anyone else to this. If she's stable, can we get her to the med lab and run some tests?"

"You say she just dropped…" Gretchen reached out and brushed one latex-gloved hand on the edge of the helm, even as Jack tried to catch her fingers.

"Don't—" he began.

But her eyes rolled back in her head and she dropped like a stone.

 

* * *

 

Dee had dressed quickly when the alarm had gone off, the 'all hands on deck' alarm that signalled that they should come running. Her ankle was indeed sprained, but she tugged it into a brace and then shoved it into a larger boot, lacing it tight as quickly as she could before jogging up to the atrium to find Lois and Harkness wheeling Maggie to the med bay on a litter, Cooper supporting a groggy Gretchen with an arm over her shoulders.

Cooper had briefed her in a few sentences and she took of over the support job, finally settling Gretchen in one of the high-backed swivel chairs in the lab.

Maggie wasn't awake, but she was sweating and mumbling under her breath, her head twitching minutely. Even from here, Dee could see her eyeballs moving back and forth under the lids.

"I'm fine," Gretchen said. "Just a little blip." She rested her head in her hand. "A headache now, is all."

"I told you not to touch it," Harkness admonished as he transferred Maggie's saline bag to a real IV pole and checked the flow.

Gretchen glared at him. "I had gloves on," she said, rolling her eyes and then groaning, as the movement must have hurt her head.

Dee was still trying to wrap her head around the whole thing. "You two were in the room with her, why didn't you pass out or something?"

Cooper handed Gretchen a wet towel for her forehead. "We didn't touch the armour. Maggie put the helmet on the dummy, and then she disappeared, and then she…she was the only one who touched the whole thing, all connected, her and Gretchen."

Gretchen waved a hand. "Gloves."

Dee really wanted to see the armour, but she also didn't want to puke and fall into a coma. She figured that she could wait. She might be waiting a long time. "So you just got a smaller dosage because of the glove protection," she surmised aloud. "That makes sense. And much as any of this makes sense."

Gretchen stood and breathed in deep, and Cooper reached out a steadying hand. "No, I'm okay," she said. Let me look at her." She was able to make it to Maggie's litter, and she checked vitals whilst they all stood about and waited. Dee wondered where Lois was, but she figured they'd already given her marching orders before she'd come up from the showers.

"She's at thirty-eight degrees, and her blood pressure's a little high. Pulse is a bit too fast for Maggie's normal. Eyes are moving but bloodshot. If I didn't know better," Gretchen said, pressing her hand on Maggie's forehead. "I'd say she was tripping."

Dee watched Maggie murmur quietly, her hands scratching against the sheet on the litter, slowly, unconsciously. "Can you wake her up?"

Gretchen glanced up. "I'm betting no." She leant over and patted Maggie's cheek. "Mags." No response. "What else do you want me to do?"

"Smelling salts?"

Gretchen rolled her eyes. "Oh for the love of god." She pulled back one of Maggie's eyelids. "She's unconscious. She's unresponsive. I'll run some tests, but I'm willing to bet that she has no head trauma. This is something…metaphysical."

Harkness put his hands on his hips. "We don't do metaphysical here, Gretchen."

Gretchen blinked at him. "Says the man who can't die."

"All right, all right," Cooper said, in her best 'break it up' voice. Gretchen, do you need help—"

"No," Gretchen said, waving her hands at them all. "In fact, get out. You just get in the way of the equipment." She yanked on her lab coat and checked Maggie's IV again. Harkness didn't move and Gretchen gave him a look. "I wasn't joking. I know how to do this. Get the hell out."

Cooper turned and gestured with one hand. "Ring us the minute you have something." And they made their way back into the atrium, where Lois was doing a good job of not looking worried. Then again, Dee could tell from the workstation monitors that she'd been watching them, so she must have seen everything, even if she didn't hear it.

"So," Lois began, "do we know any—"

The proximity alarms went off and Dee sat down at the workstation as she passed it, tilting the monitors to get a better view of the screens as they split into quarters to show all the fence breaches. So far there were about six of them. And they all looked like—

"Weevils," she mumbled, and Harkness leant over her shoulder.

"That's, uh, not good." He reached around her and tapped a few keys. "Can we get a wider shot?"

Dee fiddled with the controls, batting his hands away and widening the views so that she had about half of each fence-length on the screens; and every image had at least three weevils in it.

"We have about a half-dozen Weevils tagged for tracking out in the streets right now," Lois said, "and they're all on the move." She blinked. "In this direction."

Harkness glanced at Cooper. "Remember when we were positing about the weevils and the armour?"

Cooper cracked the knuckles on her right hand with her left palm. "So do you wager we have confirmation, then?"

Dee watched the three weevils manage to get over the fence and wondered why it wasn't electrified. She should have thought of that ages ago. Or run barbed wire across the top. That probably wouldn't have stopped the weevils, though; it just would have made them crankier.

"Well, something is bringing them here," Dee said aloud. "And I know I didn't send out an evite."

"A Wee-vite," Lois said under her breath and Dee caught her eye. "I pun under pressure."

"Great," Harkness said. "Someone has to."

At least ten weevils had cleared the outer gate before Dee thought to hit the metal blast doors for the front entrance, and they slid down, effectively eliminating all direct egress to the atrium, unless they managed to break the transparisteel in the eyrie. Good luck to them. It was bullet proof. She supposed they could push whole panes out of the framework, but that would take some effort.

Myfanwy would probably appreciate some moving targets.

"Are we locked in?" Harkness asked. "Because that doesn't sound very good, us locked in here with the armour and Mags being mysteriously ill."

Cooper shoved away from the workstation. "No, just the front doors The garage and eyrie exits are still untouched, and we can still exit through the roof and the sub-level passageways if need be."

Regardless, "There's a lot of them," she mused. "And they're just…coming." The weevils over the fence milled about the walls of the building.

"How many?" Cooper said over her shoulder.

Dee threw up her hands. "Twenty-five? Thirty? It's getting difficult to tell."

Cooper sighed and walked away from them all, up to her office. "Get the guns ready, tranquilisers and FMJ." She sighed halfway up the stairs, her shoulders sagging, and Dee had a feeling that she knew what Cooper was going to say. "I'm calling UNIT."

Harkness snorted. "Yeah, definitely glad I'm not in charge anymore."

 

* * *

 

Maggie swam through something dark and viscous. Every once in a while she would submerge, have trouble finding her way back up, but breathing the thing in which she was swimming didn't make her gasp for air or choke, it was just something else to breathe. It was difficult to move, though.

Somewhere in the background she could hear people talking, but it sounded like faint music on an invisible overhead speaker. If she concentrated as hard as she felt she could, she thought she could hear Gretchen or Jack, or maybe it was _The Girl From Ipanema_. Sometimes it felt as if she was floating, and sometimes her feet were on solid ground. Her calves were tired already and her fingers tried to make cups so that she could propel herself through the fluid faster. She had places to be.

There weren't any places really, though, that she could see. There was no smell or sight, nothing that she could taste in her mouth as she took in the fluid (it could have been light fluid, for all she knew, actually, light fluid in the dark is invisible light), and whilst she pressed forward, quite sure that she had a reason for doing it, that reason wasn't very clear. Oh well, sometimes it was best to just go with your gut. Or was that do what you're told?

Maggie _felt_ herself getting closer to the shore, to some sort of land or surface where she could leave the fluid behind, and as she walked up the steep slope under her feet, the fluid dredged away from her body and she breathed it out, letting it run down the front of her mouth and chin and chest like unsweetened syrup.

When it had all gone, when she no longer felt the drag of it on her ankles and the bottoms of her feet, Maggie paused and blinked a few times, wiping at her fingers, but she found that they were open, and while she couldn't see anything, she knew exactly where to go.

Her feet found a path and she trudged along, still unsure of exactly what she would find, or even how she had got here.

 

* * *

 

Jack and Gwen were checking their firearms and loading up for bear (or weevil) when he thought to bring up Gretchen's little fainting spell. "I don't know, what do you think about leaving her here with Maggie?" he asked as he pocketed a few magazines. He normally didn't do the cargo pants thing, but today he'd just felt like it; now he was being rewarded for his macabre psychic premonition with extra pockets.

Gwen was less than happy, and he couldn't blame her. At their last count, there were over fifty weevils amassing outside the complex, and who knew how long they'd stay off the press radar, or how long they'd stay fascinated with the building before they got bored and wandered out into the countryside to see what they could see. After all, it wasn't often that weevils went out in daylight or to the countryside, so maybe they were going to make a field trip of it. He was guessing that no one had had the foresight to pack a lunch.

UNIT was sending a small deployment, but by truck, from their base in Adamsdown, and it would take time to get here. One truck and a small cadre of specialist ops, which probably meant five guys and a few NATO issue firearms. And some red berets. Mmmm, red berets.

But they were stopping the truck well down the road and sweeping in the rest of the way under cover of trees, since there wasn't a guarantee that the weevils wouldn't swarm the vehicle on sight.

Jack didn't know how to address the concept of what they all thought they were going to actually _do_ once they were out there, so he chose to ask about their resident medic, who was in the middle of giving Maggie a CT scan.

"At some point in time we're going to have to trust that Gretchen can do her job," Gwen said. "I don't know what Owen would have done, but I can't imagine that Gretchen is far off here. "

Jack finished loading his Webley and snapped the cylinder shut. "You're the boss."

"For a while, I thought she wasn't going to work out," Gwen said. "She's quite bright, but she had a lot to learn. I thought she was slipping." She checked her clip again. "But a while ago she just snapped back."

Jack nodded. "Learning curve." He smiled. "I remember a certain PC tossing a chisel—"

"I'm never going to live that down, am I?"

"I'll think about it," Jack answered, tucking the Webley into the holster and reaching for the Glock. He had promised Dee that he would be a team player about the guns, and she was right, though it bothered him sometimes to carry more than one, that was his choice, and he couldn't very well complain about that.

They were going to join UNIT outside, so that they had someone in command with their commander, the only way to make sure that things stayed firmly in Torchwood's control. Jack was going to cover Gwen, and while he was out there, he figured he'd take out as many weevils as he could. The whole point of the mission was incapacitate and bag, though Gwen hadn't said what they were going to do with the weevils yet.

Where could they stash seventy-five weevils? He kept coming back to that.

They both pocketed an airsoft gun with the tranquiliser darts similar to the ones that Gretchen had used the day before, and made their way to the garage. Gwen sat in the seat of the third SUV, the one Jack had never seen them take out, and tapped her comm. "Dee, how's it looking up there?"

"I'm on the frontward side of the perimeter, and UNIT just got here," she said into the comm. "I have a tranq gun, an SA80, scads of ammo, and a few bags of pork cracklings." Dee was on the roof because of her ankle.

Jack glanced at Gwen. "I want to be on the roof with Dee. She's gonna have all the fun."

"Dee," Gwen said, "You are not to fire, regardless of what you see, until I give the order. UNIT doesn't understand our quirky ways, and we don't want them lighting into you with those pretty MP5."

"Yes ma'am," came the reply. "Five pounds says they have P-80s."

Jack snapped his fingers. "Sold."

Gwen looked skeptical, and Jack wondered how she felt having a soldier that simply followed orders most of the time. Dee wouldn't fire unless she had a very good excuse, and not even then. She'd probably let Jack get taken out, but if Gwen looked to be in trouble, she might violate orders. But she wouldn't lose patience and simply begin to fire if the weevils got too close for her liking.

Jack wanted to tell her that this was how it was supposed to work, but he didn't want her to get used to it. Torchwood wasn't made for that kind of military precision, and sooner or later Dee would figure that out.

She'd probably still make him carry the fucking Glock, though.

"Lois, can you patch me back through to Commander Harrison?" Gwen asked, key in the ignition but not turned. Jack sighed and eyed Gwen's stab vest and gorget. The gorget was a good idea, even if it cut down on mobility; weevils went for the throat too easily, and the vest didn't protect it enough.

"This is Harrison," said a youngish voice on the comm.

Gwen smiled and Jack knew that she liked Harrison. He wondered if they'd actually met before or if he just had one of those likeable voices. Some people had good voices. Jack thought of them as phone sex voices. "Commander Harrison, this is Director Cooper," Gwen said, and Jack started. This was the first time Gwen had pulled rank around him. Of course she wasn't a captain, but she was more than 'agent'. "I heard you're here."

"Ma'am, you have a clusterfuck out here," Harrison said, his voice clipped and low. "Are these…weevils…are they hostile?"

"Pretty much," Gwen said. "They'll take human flesh if they can get it easily, and it doesn't take much for them to decide to attack even if they're not hungry." She glanced at Jack. "As far as this whole thing, we might have picked up an alien artefact that they're eager to get back, but that's not an option."

There was a snort on the other end. "Why am I not surprised?" There was a pause, and Jack wondered just where Harrison was talking to them from, and if there were any other people on the call. "So how do we take them out?"

"You don't," Gwen said quickly, glancing at him. This was Jack's time to think of something. "We can't just kill them all."

"All due respect ma'am, but why not?"

Jack watched Gwen's lips twitch. "They don't actually know what they're doing. Do you kill tigers jus because they're dangerous?"

"I do when they wander into populated areas, ma'am."

Jack had to admit he had a point; unfortunately that point was lost in the sea of alternate orders. "If we can get them all inside the gates, we have a few concussive gas grenades that will put them down," he said, and Gwen smiled at him.

"Those clear of Hague?" Harrison asked and Jack rolled his eyes. Like Torchwood ever had to worry about any of that stuff.

"We're Torchwood," Jack said. "As far as Hague is concerned, we don't exist."

Gwen gave him a grateful smile and they slapped hands together. Trust UNIT to get all stroppy. It just stuck in their craw that Torchwood occasionally got to do things they didn't, possibly also because they didn't have to wear uniforms. Jack looked down at his military surplus cargo pants and T-shirt—well, no one required him to put this on. Tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow, he was wearing braces and a jumper. Or a bathrobe. He wondered what Gwen would say if he took the day off and then wandered about in his bathrobe while they were all trying to work.

Also, note to self: purchase bathrobe.

"We're coming out to you," Gwen said, "And we have a sharpshooter on the roof standing by, so if she has to fire, just let her."

"If my men hear gunfire, they're going to want to shoot something."

Jack felt the corner of his mouth twitch. He wanted to talk so badly.

Gwen did it for him, thank god. "Then your men should think about a new line of work, Commander. Only one person is going to be shooting out there, and she's on our roof."

"She better be a good shot," grumbled Harrison, and Gwen muffled the comm with her hand, turning to Jack.

"We should set him up with Dee, on a date."

Jack pretended to think about it. "Only if we have cameras in the restaurant."

"Okay, Commander, we're on our way out. We'll ring you when we get closer to the main gates, see if we can't approach this from inside and out."

"We'll be awaiting your arrival, ma'am, Captain. Out."

Jack turned his comm off. "Those UNIT boys, always so po-lite." He drummed his hands on the dashboard in front of him. "So we're going to drive out there to the front gates and see if we can't just let all the weevils in, right?"

"Lois has already opened the main gates, so now they're inside the compound, but they can't get in the building," Gwen answered, needlessly adjusting the mirrors. "So we're going to see if they just let us go right out; we'll rendezvous with UNIT down the road, and go in all at once."

Jack thought about it. They could have just coordinated with UNIT from the roof, but he understood the need to get out to UNIT, to have someone with them, when they finally did something about the, well. Ianto used to call it a _shitload_ of weevils, and he wasn't far off. "Yeah, I don't feel comfortable with the decisions Harrison might make if we're not there," he added finally. "Though what are we going to do with all these weevils?"

They sat in the car and stared straight ahead in the halogen of the overhead lights. Gwen pressed her comm. "Gretchen?"

"We're here and stable, Boss," Gretchen said, her voice far away, as if she was talking into the speakerphone. Jack breathed a sigh of relief that Maggie and Gretchen seemed to be all right. That remained to be seen, but still, so far, so good. "Mags has some crazy brain activity, but no damage. I think she might be coming out of it a little."

Gwen paused and closed her eyes for a long second. Jack wondered if she was tired. It occurred to him that he hadn't asked about her kid in ages, hadn't seen Rhys or the baby since he'd got back, aside from a few waves from across the carpark when Rhys had come to pick her up. "All right," Gwen said. "Everyone, keep this line open in the background of whatever you're doing."

Dee signalled assent and Lois said something clipped. Gretchen mumbled something and he could hear Maggie murmuring in the faint background, so at least she was making noise. Jack was not medic, but making noise was good, right?

Gwen turned the key in the ignition and grinned at him. "You haven't said anything about us taking TW33," she said.

Jack shrugged. He had his theories. "I figured you knew best, Boss."

"I bet you're dying to see what this Twee thing can do."

He raised an eyebrow. "It has selectable four-wheel drive?"

Gwen gunned the gas for emphasis while still in neutral, opened a panel in the dashboard and pressed a few switches. Along the frame and join of the entire vehicle, thin poles like radio antennae surfaced and rose out of the metalwork until the car was virtually covered in six-inch spikes along the rim of the hood, the back outline of the boot, probably all around the door frames, as well. Another switch and Jack watched as jolts of electricity shot between the poles.

"You electrified the car," Jack said, not sure what to think.

Gwen smiled. "We did. Fun, huh?"

Jack shook his head. "You electrified the car."

Gwen gunned the engine again, and pressed her comm. "Lois, we're ready to exit."

"You are clear out of the rear, though if you waste too much time they'll be on to you," Lois said. "I suggest you burn rubber as soon as you're free of the door."

True to Lois's testimony, the back was clear, though already there were a few weevils trying to climb the fence back here, as if they had come out of the forest. Gwen glanced at him and he was about to make a joke about 'the elusive farm weevil' as they pushed out into the sunlight, but it wasn't quite funny enough to waste breath on. One weevil ran towards them, but as the door closed behind them, it seemed decreasingly interested and veered away, as if it sensed it wasn't getting inside this way, nor was there anything in the car it might like.

This had the potential to be a lot easier than they had thought.

It was the same as they rounded the side and Jack and Gwen got to see them for the first time: maybe fifty weevils all over the compound, more coming over the fence, approaching the front or the sides, and staying close to the walls, as if they expected holes to appear and let them into the building at any time. Jack might have been concerned if they had any digging, burrowing, or blasting skills, but other than banding together to pry open the metal doors from the front entrance, or somehow getting in the garage access or the greenhouse, the weevils weren't going to get far.

The weevils staggered around the car, but they didn't seem to be particularly interested in it. Jack was reminded of their singular mindedness around Owen after he died. That the armour was inside the building, and that they were rather interested in getting into and milling about the building, was fairly ominous. Not that he was a big fan of correlation equaling causation, but in this case, the scrabble tiles were spelling out a word.

"You ever get the feeling that we make most of our problems?" Gwen murmured as she drove slowly through the parting hordes of weevils.

Jack gripped the Jesus bar. "Comes with the territory of being tech salvagers and pioneers, you know. Hard to avoid mistakes if you don't know you're making them."

Gwen stopped when a group of five weevils didn't feel the need to move away in front of her. They just shuffled about, looking at the building to the left of the car, and Gwen finally edged the car forward so that the electrified prods got quite close for comfort and the closest weevil jumped, and turned to hit the car. It made contact with one of the rods and jerked, then took off in the opposite direction, the other weevils in tow. Convenient.

"I just wish we were saving more things," she said, "without so much collateral damage."

Jack had to give her points for morbidity. "You can't see it now, but really, we do. When this is over, we'll make a chart." He glanced at her. "It's just that the damage we take is costly, not constant."

Gwen bit her lower lip, but didn't reply, and thank god, because Jack didn't want to have a heart-to-heart about Toshiko and Owen and Ianto right now, not in the middle of all of this. It would be blasphemous. And also Torchwood, probably.

She turned towards the open gate and wheeled slowly down the road, increasing her clip when the weevils became fewer the farther they got from the building. Jack spared a moment to look backward at the Hub.

"Jesus, it's like Night of the Living Dead," he mumbled.

Gwen glanced at him. "Zombie weevils would be the last straw, Jack." The car cleared the gates.

"Ma'am," Dee said softly into the open comm, They're about five metres to your left, and ten metres to your right."

"Thank you Dee. Lois, how does everything look?"

"I'm loading the level one gas grenades into the valve locks on the outer apertures of the building," Lois said. "But I remind you that we never actually tested this on, well, anything."

Jack glanced at Gwen as she pulled to the side of the road and sighed. "Get gas masks for yourself and Gretch and Mags." A pause. "And toss one up on the roof for Dee."

"Gee, thanks."

There was a flash from the woods, a tactical torch or something, and Gwen turned the electricity prods off. She flashed her lights once. "Lo, get me Harrison again. Might as well get this show on the road."

 

* * *

 

Maggie held her hand in front of her and waved it. She could see it and not see it. Her eyes couldn't see her hand, but her non-eyes could. What was that?

 _I'm on a journey_ , she thought to herself, or might have said aloud, except there was no aloud, everything was aloud here. It was almost deafening, the thinking, so she tried not to do much of it. She waved her hands and waited, moved her feet forward on the tangible invisible black ground and searched.

Feet. Her feet were heavy and they weren't attached to her body. That was new. She sensed that she was still moving with her feet, but they were barely there, barely tethered.

Off in the distance something winked, bright, a flicker just for a second. She heard a voice for a moment, a familiar one, but not Jack or Gwen or Gretchen. Someone else.

Brian? she thought, and winced into the aloudness of it. The sound of it echoing through her head like a cavern. Not Brian, then.

Her feet told her they'd find the answer, if she'd just let them go.

 

* * *

 

Gretchen patted her sternum, inhaling deeply. Her heart was still doing backflips and the fluttering in her chest, but it wasn't feeling like it was going to burst. Mitrial valve prolapse was common in females in their thirties, she tried to remind herself. It was harmless and a result of hormones.

And this was not it, but a girl could dream. Rather, a girl could delude.

Maggie moaned on her litter and Gretchen cast a glance over her shoulder at the woman. She wasn't looking quite well, but she was on the monitor, and her heart was fine, and the pulse-ox on her finger said that everything was in the clear.

Part of Gretchen desperately wanted to move Maggie to hospital. The other part of her told her that they'd be less equipped to diagnose her, and they'd do everything that she'd already done. She wasn't a real doctor. She wasn't a moron either.

Back to the girl deluding, then. Her heart did a little flibberty-flib.

She didn't know what had happened when she had touched the armour, but Gretchen remembered falling to the ground. She could hear Jack and Gwen shaking her, calling her name, picking her up, but she couldn't do anything about it. It had taken her what felt like forever just to open her eyes, though it had just been five minutes.

She didn't have a good explanation for what had happened, aside from, 'Torchwood', and Gwen was impatient for one. Gretchen wanted to be able to tell her something, but Maggie's CT was normal. Her EKG was normal. Aside from getting her into an MRI, there was nothing to do. Gretchen wasn't volunteering herself for the CT scanner, but that was different. Besides, she felt _fine_.

"Gretchen," Lois said into the comm, "can you come down here and help me load these canisters?"

She sighed and glanced away from the table of results over to Maggie, still and mumbling, face a little flushed. Her blood pressure was still high, but not insanely so. Unless she got up and started trashing the place, there was no reason she wouldn't be all right for the ten minutes Gretchen would be gone.

Lois was at the front wall that housed the outer entrance to the building. As she passed the monitors, Gretchen watched a gaggle of weevils huddle in their communicative groupings, no doubt their version of a scrum. They wanted in, she could tell by the way some of them tested the walls for openings, their hands roaming the concrete surface. Lois gestured her over, a rolling trolley stacked with two wooden boxes next to her.

Lois pulled one of the canisters out. "They fit into the holes in the walls at two metre intervals," Lois said, "but some of them aren't slotting in." She pressed the canister, which looked a little like a hair spray can minus the nozzle, pointy end in and pushed with both hands and almost all her weight. She was rewarded with a little _clickhiss!_. "Like that. But they're just…" She pressed another into a hole at waist-height further away, and leant all her weight on it. Nothing happened. "I don't know if it's a faulty mechanism, or just that they're new, or if this is a dud, or what." She grunted and pressed harder.

Gretchen waved her away and grabbed the canister, pressing in. In the background of her comm she could hear the beep of Maggie's pulse-ox, the sound of Dee eating pork cracklings, and Jack and Gwen talking in rapid speech to Commander Harrison. Getting used to ignoring the dimmed comm was a skill she was glad she'd finally learnt.

She jiggled the canister back and forth in the hole. "Maybe if we twist—"

"Don't twist—" Lois held up a hand and there was a snap hiss and aerosolised gas began to shoot back at them. "Oh bugger—" Lois yanked the masks from the trolley and slapped one on her face whilst shoving the other at Gretchen. Gretchen tried to get the thing on and keep her comm in, but it was a losing battle. In the end, she settled for strapping the mask to her face and simply holding the earpiece to her ear, so that she could hear Dee's voice, asking what had happened.

Lois's sigh was tinny. "Canister malfunction. We really should have tested this first." She walked the space to the closest workstation and turned on the main ventilation in the atrium, and every paper in the room ruffled. Gretchen felt her hair lift with the breeze of the slight vacuum the giant fans in the system created when they wanted to pull the old air from the atrium and cycle new air in.

Jack's voice was light. "Relax soldier. It's just night-night gas."

Gretchen felt one of her eyebrows raise. "Night. Night. Gas."

Lois shrugged and grabbed another canister, handing it to her. "Don't. Twist." The gas continued to fog out of the hole in the wall, and Gretchen yanked the canister out and set it on the floor so that it could sputter out the last of the gas. She was thankful that Sam and Dean were on the other side of the giant room.

They managed to get the last of the canisters in place with no accidents, and the errant one they'd left to drain into the room was finished, its last pathetic splutters enough to send it onto its side and roll towards the carpeted area. Gretchen watched as Lois checked the air supply before pulling her mask from her face and tossing it in the empty wooden box on the trolley. She gave Gretchen a diluted version of The Look, which meant that Lois was still a little upset about the whole canister thing, but knew that she wasn't quite upset.

They'd been working together too long, Gretchen thought, though that didn't seem like the right thing to say.

"We're ready, ma'am," Lois said into the comm, and Gretchen fitted hers back into her ear again, listening for Maggie's pulse-ox. It was there in the background. Dee was silent, but that was probably because she'd either had a coronary from her unhealthy eating or she was checking her weapon. Probably the latter. Dee didn't have many vices, and the occasional pub snack was probably the only one. Well, that and shooting things.

"Go ahead," Gwen said, and Lois released the system with a few keystrokes. They watched the canisters sink a few more inches into the wall as the interlocking system accepted them and routed the gas into the piping that threaded through the ground level of the building. Even now it was being released in high-powered pressurised bursts all over the outside, enough to cloud the building in a ring of sedatives for at least six metres out.

"Wow," Jack said under his breath, "that's morbid."

Gretchen and Lois watched through one of the monitors aimed at the front of the building as weevils fell left and right. Some swayed on their feet and fell over, others went down like stiff boards. One of them lowered itself to the ground gracefully, as if it knew that it had no choice but to go to sleep.

The rest of the weevils, over half of them, seemed to sense that there was something amiss, and they scattered, bolting all over the compound like frightened animals. Gretchen felt for them—in some ways this was probably terrifying or at the very least supremely confusing for them. She didn't know what their intelligence level was, but empathy for them as a species wasn't limited by that. Harrison's men were visible on the fenced perimeter, and some of the weevils just fell as they were hit by bullets, hopefully tranquilisers. Gretchen could hear Gwen barking orders to Jack and Dee, and a few directives to Harrison to tighten his men here and there.

It was fascinating. Once when she had been a child, Gretchen had seen video footage of a penned in buffalo hunt from the United States. Men paid money to shoot at released buffalo in a fenced in area. It was bloody and wretched and had reminded Gretchen of the phrase, 'shooting fish in a barrel'. This was kind of like that. It was easy to forget that weevils were dangerous when you watched them scurry in nigh panic.

One weevil on the far end of the front wall ran for the fence and made it as far as the soldier stationed twenty metres from the fence, and it lashed out, both hands whipping through the air at the soldier's neck. He shot it in the face, its head blossoming into red even as he clutched his own neck as he fell backwards, bleeding out from where the weevil had cut through his body armour, or rather, around his body armour.

There was an insistent noise in the back of her comm that she had been ignoring, and it took her a second after she watched the soldier collapse to realise that she should have been paying attention to it. Maggie's pulse-ox was off. Or she was dead. Gretchen keyed up the lab camera and saw that the bed was empty.

Lois blinked. "Shit."

Gretchen glanced about, and just as she turned to head towards the room behind them, she saw the tail end of Maggie's hospital gown disappear around the corner to her lab. "Fuck," she mumbled, dashing after her. "Get a gun," she told Lois, "just in case."

Maggie had made it back to her lab by the time they got there, and Gretchen had just enough time to stagger in the doorway and watch Maggie slip both her feet into the boots she'd removed from the suit of armour.

"Mags—"

Maggie glanced up then, and Gretchen could see from here the blown pupils, the distant look. Then Maggie lifted one foot, stamped it on the ground, and simply disappeared.

"Maggie's gone," she said over her shoulder to Lois, who waited in the hallway with a firearm.

"Gone, how?" Gwen said distractedly. The weevils who had scattered were still plentiful, and they weren't close enough to the building to suck the gas in, Gretchen guessed.

She drew in a deep breath and cocked her head. "She put on the boots from the armour, stamped her foot, and just disappeared."

There was a sound of taserfire and Jack swore. "Dee, get those ones on the south west quadrant before they make for the—thank you. Mags is gone?"

Gretchen entered the room and steered clear of the armour, but leant over one of the workstations to call up a bioscan. "Yeah. She'd not in the building anymore, according to the computer."

 

* * *

 

The darkness was loud and windy. It was cold and hollow, so far from the thick syrup of before, or the craggy void-like mountains of negative space she'd climbed. This was stuffy and filled with things that moved but didn't touch her, as if they were out of sync with her, like double-exposed film. Her thinking didn't echo, and when she opened her mouth to speak, all that came out was a soft whistling.

Owen turned to Maggie and dropped the scalpel. "You shouldn't be here," he told her. Behind him, the woman chained to the blackness groaned.

"What are you—"

Owen held a finger to his lips. "Really," he said, when he lowered his hand from his face, smiling. "You shouldn't be here." He shrugged. "I'm not here."

"And her?"

Owen looked back at the woman, his body turning so that Maggie could see he'd opened her up at the stomach and taken out her bowels, wet and slippery like eels or pre-linked sausage. "Who, Suze? Nah, she's here. She came on purpose."

"Who comes here on purpose?" Maggie asked. It seemed silly to ask where _here_ was, or what Owen was or wasn't doing there, or who Suzie was or what she did. Suzie looked up then, looked into her eyes and smiled.

"Tell my Jack that I-- _brrrrrzaaaaakt twwwwwwwip shreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—_ "

Owen yanked the intestines from Suzie and her body sagged, as if he'd pulled the plug. "Sometimes you have to reboot her." He turned to her fully then and looked at her up and down, his eyes falling on the sabatons. "Oh, those are my shoes." His eyes flitted back up to hers for a second before returning to the shoes. "Where did you say you were from again?"

Maggie stepped back. "I didn't."

Owen tilted his head and smiled. "I do love those shoes."

Maggie was about a hundred and ten percent sure that this wasn't Owen. In fact, she wasn't sure what was happening, but it was starting to come back to her, the armour, Torchwood, the map, the weevils."

Owen narrowed his eyes at her as if he had read it all in her brain and didn't like what he'd found. "They're still there, huh?" He raised a hand. There was a strange noise with the movement, like metal scraping on metal. "Sol 3, right?"

Maggie took another step backwards, and Suzie jolted to life then, raising her head. Her eyes were solid black, pupils swallowing everything else. "Sol 3," she said slowly, her voice low. "Been a while. Shut out of there."

Owen smiled at Maggie, and his teeth had sharpened to two pointy rows. "Don't worry. We'll use Mapquest." He reached out for Maggie and she tripped backwards, out of his circle of movement. Something held him back as she scrabbled backwards, and he reached out to her, eyes not seeing her as she got farther away.

Suzie laughed. "Enter the address of your destination and click 'Get Directions'."

Maggie turned away from them and reached down to touch the boots. Maybe there was a button to press to get her out of here. They were just smooth plated metal.

There was a sound from her left and she turned to see Jack standing in front of her, eyes black and blown, teeth pointed. He grabbed her by the neck and lifted a little, pulling her in towards his mouth.

"Zoom in," he whispered.

 

* * *

 

The first gas canister had made them scatter, and that had been predicted, but Harrison and Gwen and Jack (to some extent—it was a surreal thing to stand back and watch them make decisions. Should he butt in? He grasped his hands behind his back and rocked on he heels. He might have even bit the inside of his mouth in amusement), well, the three of them had decided that the UNIT…unit was just going to contain the weevils inside the gated area until they were all down. Then they would have to figure out what to do with them from there.

The idea that the weevils would just disburse and return to their homes in an orderly fashion was about as likely as them all deciding to do the Thriller dance in unison, but even so, Jack hadn't calculated that so many of them would be hip to the square. As it was, one man was already down by the time Gretchen and Lois told them that Maggie had disappeared. He was at the main gate trying to stem the tide of weevil evacuees when there was a vague popping sound, like the grinding of a ball joint in a socket and Maggie appeared, materialising in a circle of weevils and glancing about wildly. He put his gun up and watched for a split second, unsure of what to do.

"Gwen," he began.

"I see her," Gwen said, her voice a little out of breath.

Maggie's hair rippled as if it was alive, and her eyes glowed when she looked at him, and then the weevils started wards her in one big throng, a ripple of claws and snarls and sliding blue satin.

Maggie blinked once, and she seemed to see where she was, what was about to happen, but she just tipped up her chin and opened her mouth.

"Stop."

Jack froze at the sound, like a large bell, one of those giant ones in a Buddhist temple, ringing one sonorous knell wrapped up in the sound of Maggie's vocal folds. It pounded through him in a long chord and he felt it in every fibre of his being, from his toenails to the split ends on his head.

The weevils, every single one of them, froze right where they stood and then collapsed, as if Maggie had cut their puppet strings, and then Maggie toppled with them; he ran forward to tug her out of the mass of downed weevils just in case they decided to get back up.

He wasn't even there yet when he realised that something was off. Every single weevil had just stopped. But they weren't asleep. He saw movement from across the compound and knew that UNIT was on the move again, and Gwen was with them most assuredly.

"Captain Harkness," Lois said into his ear, "Ma'am, you both—"

"Not now, Lois," Jack said, just as Gwen said "What?"

"There was a—it's. There were about fifty Rift spikes all over the city. Half of them were in known weevil nests." A pause. "The biggest one was here, just now."

Jack stepped over a pile of weevils and crouched down next to Maggie. He used his handkerchief to swathe his hand while he tugged the boots from Maggie's feet—her skin was bruised a brilliant purple everywhere the boots had touched her skin, and if he peered he could see the broken blood vessels.

Gretchen came screeching to the gate and hurtled out of the motor cart, her gun drawn. UNIT was coming from the trees on either side of the road, and around the building perimeter, guns at the ready.

Jack took off his shirt and wrapped the boots up inside it. The last thing he wanted was UNIT getting their hands on this tech. It was nothing but trouble, and he could imagine the kinds of mischief people with no foresight and a lot of greed could do with these.

"Jack," Gwen asked, "is she—"

Jack turned Maggie over and felt for a pulse. "Yeah, she's here, she's alive."

Maggie's eyes opened, and he was relieved to see their blue irises again. She reached up with one hand and scrabbled for purchase on his shoulder, but something in her fingers wasn't working, and Jack had to steady her, gripping her hand in his as she struggled to sit up. Her mouth was working as she moved, and he had to bend down to hear her when he realised that she'd been trying to say something to him.

"Rift slipper," she whispered.

Gretchen made a clicking noise with her tongue. "Boss?"

"Yes?" Gwen sounded distracted. No wonder. Jack could hear her arguing with someone, probably Commander Harrison in the background. Probably jurisdiction.

"All these weevils are dead."

 

* * *

 

It had been a shite week. That was the only way to describe it: shite week.

It had taken three days to get UNIT to decide to help clear away more than the weevils at the Hub. There had been about sixty, but others littered the area, as if they had been on their way to the Hub when they had died. As the teams went down into the sewers and nests, it all become corpse clean-up, as every weevil they encountered was stone dead, as if when Maggie had spoken, every weevil in Cardiff had just fallen down and died. Gretchen had selected several to study and they'd been placed in cold storage, but Torchwood simply didn't have enough space to freeze them all, and so they had to incinerate them in batches.

It was gruelling work, and Gwen was uncomfortable with the idea of shoveling bodies into the incinerator, but there was little else they could do.

Maggie hadn't remembered anything after touching the helmet, certainly not what she'd done to the weevils, whatever it was that she'd done, and the only thing she did remember were dreams, she said, dreams where she talked to Owen and some other people, one of them Suzie. She didn't know what the words 'Rift slipper' meant, and she didn't even remember putting on the boots. She was a wreck, even though she'd been cleared by every scan and medical test known to man, spent a whole day over at CRI having the full gamut done. She remained convinced that she had brought this on all of them, and Gwen wasn't sure if she gave her a few days off so that she could recuperate at home or so that Gwen and the others didn't have to hear her saying "I'm sorry, so sorry," over and over again.

On the other hand, it was hard not to feel guilty, when one word from your mouth had killed an entire species. Not one live weevil had been spotted since Maggie's proclamation. Jack had said that he had people he could talk to, but he hadn't the chance.

UNIT had been taxing on them all, and at their suggestion, Gwen had considered the idea of adding a liaison to the team, someone with limited capacity who could answer to Torchwood and work on the team, but with UNIT history and contacts. It remained to be seen what this person would do, and Gwen wasn't wild about the idea; it introduced a whole level of uncertainty to the mix, and until she could figure out how often they might be calling on UNIT in the future, she wasn't going to say yes or no.

Gretchen said they should get a medic, her voice low, she'd taken Gwen aside and recommended it. There was always more than enough work to justify it, and she offered to take a pay cut, like Gwen would ever consider that. Gwen wasn't sure if Gretchen was just nervous after the experience with Maggie or if they actually had reason to be concerned, but in a week or so, she'd take everyone's written reports and sit down in a coffeeshop and read them through chronologically and objectively, look for errors, flaws, possible future problems. If Gretchen's lack of human medical expertise was one of those things, then they would address it.

For now, Lois and Dee sat with Gwen in the conference room and made heads and tails of the UNIT documentation they'd sent over. Dee was good at this jargon, and she winnowed the good bits out for them amidst a sea of bullshit. They counted the number of bullets they fired, for Christ's sake. Gwen barely knew what kind of bullets were in her firearm. That was Dee's job.

"Commander Harrison says that there's a service for the dead officer on Thursday," Dee said mildly. "We should make an appearance, one of us." She blinked. "I still have dress uniform—"

Gwen waved a hand. "If you want. Give Commander Harrison my regards."

That was that, then. They could pack this whole thing up and pretend that they hadn't brought it on themselves, really.

"You know what I don't like about this," Dee said, picking at a nail, "is the idea that everything was so easy to find. Anyone who found that breastplate could have figured out that map and got that armour. And who puts a map on something like that?"

Gwen sat back. "Well, it's a safe bet that if the average human tried to get the armour, they'd have been weevil chow before they managed it," she offered. "Though we managed fairly well. You would think they would have planned on a team like our coming in and taking it."

Lois tapped the table with her nails. "I don't know. The last time the second glove was used was when? The middle ages? Maybe they just hadn't accounted for modern weaponry."

There was a thought. Gwen thought about fighting a horde of weevils with just a short sword or a pitchfork and decided that she wouldn't have made it far. Or maybe she would have. Maybe she would have discovered her inner Joan of Arc, or Xena Warrior Princess. The idea of a Medieval Torchwood made her smile inside, though in her head she put Jack in charge. He looked good in a suit or armour

'Sir Harkness of Mirkwood' had a sort of funny ring to it.

"Right," she said aloud, " the armour has been parceled into secure storage?"

"Oh yeah," Lois said, and then when they glanced at her, she looked startles. "I mean, yes. Yes, it has. Dee and I dismantled it separately and boxed it in titanium, lead and silk." She clicked her pen in and out with one hand. "It's logged and labelled 'not for use'."

Gwen nodded. "Good. Good."

"Though when anyone listens to a tag that says 'Not For Use' in here is debatable," Dee mumbled.

Gwen watched the pittins rock the Habitrail across the atrium. Still hyper and unsettled, those two. She wondered if it had been the weevils, or the armour itself, or the thing that Maggie had told them traveled for the armour.

If something was coming for the armour, Gwen wasn't sure if she wanted it to be under her thumb or somewhere far away. Something to deal with later. There were only so many things she could worry about in a day, and Maggie hadn't been the most reliable narrator there.

"I have to be off," Lois said, dusting her hands. "Does anyone need anything?"

Dee closed her folder. "No, I'll walk out with you." And she left the room, her heels clonking on the grating. Lois watched her go nervously, then turned back to Gwen. "Are you sure you don't need anything?"

Gwen sat back and picked at a hangnail on her thumb with her forefinger. "No," she said.

Lois nodded and walked to the doorway. "Right then." She turned and almost ran into Jack, who was coming in, hands in his pockets. He steadied her before they could bump into one another, and she stepped around him.

Jack turned and walked backwards a step, grinning. "Where to, soldier?"

Lois tried to look nonchalant. "It's…it's personal."

Jack reached out and caught her by the elbow, leaning in to whisper something in her ear, and Lois ducked her head a bit, lashes fluttering. Gwen thought she saw a little bit of a flush creep into her cheeks, but it was hard to tell. Jack let go of her arm and patted her shoulder, and she streaked away, clattering down the stairs. Jack sauntered in and dropped into the chair next to Gwen and slouched. He tilted his head back and spun the chair about, propelling himself with his legs.

"What was that about?" Gwen asked.

Jack smiled at her as he revolved around to face her. "I was just giving her a pointer about erogenous zones."

"What?"

Jack nodded and hummed to himself. "Lois has a date," he informed her.

Gwen heard the access door shut and thought about it. "No," she said slowly, "not that alien…what was her name?"

"Dor." Jack's eyes were alight with amusement. "She's in for a treat. Dor wouldn't give it away if she didn't think it was worth it."

Gwen shook her head. "You people."

Jack rolled the chair towards the sideboard with the coffee carafe. "Oh come off it, Gwen. Lois needs to get laid." He turned back to her and raised an eyebrow. "Or might I remind you that you are the only one who has reliable access to sex? Well, unless you count Dee visiting her lady doctor," he capitulated, and then smiled at his own bad joke.

Gwen watched him pour himself some coffee from the thermal carafe and sip it, making a face. It was about five hours old, but he drank it anyway. He did have a point about that. What did that say, also, that she had someone at home waiting for her, two someones, actually, and here she was, watching Jack drink old coffee and talking about Lois's sex life?

"How are you, Jack?" she asked suddenly.

He lifted one hand from the coffee mug and did that diffident wave. "Oh, comme si comme ça."

Gwen nodded and watched him resume drinking his coffee, hunched over in his chair, his elbows on his thighs. He was still pale, but she wasn't sure if that was from lack of sun or from tiredness. His eyes stared off into space, and he was obviously somewhere else.

She checked the clock: six-thirty. The monitor was quiet, and it was set to alert her mobile if something happened. They'd been doing this for a while before Jack had come back, and she wasn't going to just sacrifice everyone's autonomy for the sake of having an onsite watchdog twenty-four-seven.

She slapped her thighs. "Rhys is making lasagna," she said, standing. "Come on, then."

Jack looked up at her, still bent over, half-empty coffee mug sloshing perilously. "What?"

Gwen took the coffee mug from him and set it on the sideboard. "It's supper time. Italian." She smiled. "I was told there'd be garlic bread." She leveled her eyes at him. "And if you happen to drink too much, we have a guest room."

Jack stood, eyes glued to her face, as if he was looking for something there, and she widened her eyes and gave a little head nod to the door. He dropped her hand and preceded her out and down the stairs. "I'll get my coat."

 

* * *

 

The next afternoon, Jack sipped his drink and watched the tarot cards flip down on the table in front of him. He didn't actually care what they meant, and the little girl in front of him wasn't reading for him, _per se_. She was never reading for anyone _per se_ , they just fell into the cards.

Of course talking to Faith without the cards being a playing factor would be like asking for chips down at the local without them being cooked in oil. It was part and parcel.

"You never have good answers," he said, thinking that not only would he never talk to an actual little girl like this, he probably wouldn't talk to another woman like this, either. Faith had a special place in his heart. The unfuckable being. His dick didn't like the idea of sex or not sex. It didn't know how to proceed.

"You never ask the right questions, Captain," Faith said, laying down the Empress.

"Okay," Jack said, "how is it that you came from such a religious upbringing and you're in here, shilling cards for a living?"

Faith rolled her eyes. "I own stock in Dell."

Jack wondered if she'd ever gone through a petulant adolescent youth, and then a sexual interest, despite that she certainly didn't have hormones, or, you know, a heart beat. Being dead and then resurrected by the gauntlet had to suck. Owen hadn't been fond of it. And what with kids and their penchant for falling down and getting scraped knees, Jack wondered what her body looked like under the high-necked dress and thick tights.

"You should have asked me, 'Why do the weevils care about the armour?'"

Jack set his elbows on the table, cupped his chin in his hands and batted his lashes. "Why do the weevils care about the armour?"

Faith shrugged and laid out the Emperor. "I don't know." He opened his mouth and she flipped out the Page of Cups, slapping it over the first card. "But it would have been a good question to ask."

"What _do_ you know about the rest of the armour?" Jack asked, turning his glass around on the table. Off to the side, Rashid, Faith's interminable bodyguard, stared at him blandly.

The pub was all but deserted, and that had more do to with the fact that it was pre-happy hour than the fact that the pub was run down and smelled like oysters. The last time this place had seen an oyster had probably been shortly after he'd met its faithful inhabitant for the first time. But the beer was decent, and the whisky, actually, this wasn't bad. Neat. Quality. Not been opened and then sealed shut for fifty years with a wedge of cheesecloth jammed in the bottleneck.

"The rest of the armour was never something we thought much about," she said. "But again, a good thing to consider." She stared at him while turning over the card of Death. Jack didn't even blink. He got the death card all the time. Every time. It wasn't even a bad card, even. "Do you think it all raises the dead?"

Jack didn't have an answer to that. "All the parts do something different," he admitted to her. She deserved to know anyway, what with her lack of heartbeat and all. "Except the arms and legs, they just conduct energy from the feet to the arms to the head and the chest."

"Like a battery," Faith said, smiling. "Like the energy it would take a glove to bring someone back to life?"

Jack blinked. "Like that, yeah. Kinetic energy gathered and transformed and then funneled through the gloves, the boots, the helmet, everything."

Faith turned over the card and slid it to her right. It was the Seven of Wands, upside down. She smirked at the card and snorted to herself but didn't offer comment.

Jack sipped his drink. "Anyway, I thought if you knew anything, you could pass it on," he said. "What with the connection and all."

Faith glanced up at him then, and the look in those eyes was something that wasn't ever supposed to be present in a child's face. It wasn't evil, or mean, or sad. It wasn't even _knowing_ on an intellectual level, but on a spiritual level, a feeling of age that couldn't be expressed in anything but hand gestures and noises, actually. It took one to know one, and in some ways this was both their times to know one.

Well, the Doctor, but he wasn't human, wasn't like them. Nine hundred was normal to him. Jack and Faith would have been happy with ninety.

"Do you think they made the armour? The weevils?"

Jack shook his head. "I don't think they're adept enough with their hands."

"Guarding the armour, then?" Faith flipped over the Seven of Swords and grinned. "What if they were just some over-glorified alien guard dogs left too long alone without their masters?"

Jack paused, drink midway to his mouth. That idea had merit. "What do you say to working on consultancy?" he asked Faith. "Really. There has to be something you want, something we can give you."

Faith cocked her head. "Really, you can't, you know. What I want." Her eyes ran over his face then, looking at his mouth, then down before she shook herself like a dog and slapped down a card: The Fool. "Well, I stopped wanting, before. Pointless, you know, for me. It would be like you wanting to die." She glanced up. "You know."

Jack finished his drink and thought about asking for another. Oh, what the hell. He was taking a taxi, and he was also technically 'off' for the night.

"So, do you actually know anything?"

She glanced at him. "Now who's being petulant?"

He sighed. Behind him, the lone occupied table manned by three old timers playing a never-ending game of dominoes creaked and clacked as they shuffled the tiles on the smooth surface. "Who do you think the armour belonged to?" he asked. "Death?"

Faith gave him The Look. The one that said, _Bitch, please_. "It's not from this place, this world," she said. "But whatever wore it is something we don't want to meet." She snorted. "Death. Whatever. You have other things to worry about."

Jack looked at the card she slipped haphazardly on the table. The Moon. It could have been The Altolusso for all he understood it. Tarot and other voodoo was for all those people who had time to worry about metaphysical shite.

Faith raised her brow. "Someone important is hiding something, Captain."

When she started telling him his fortune, then it was his cue to leave. He tossed a tenner on the table and winked at her bodyguard. "Get yourself a Shirley Temple, and go to bed at a decent hour, babe."

She handed him the next card. "For you. Keep it in mind."

Jack glanced down at the card, hot in his hand as if she'd just taken it from a fire and not from the deck on the table: The Lovers. Over his shoulder, Ianto snorted. "Oh, that's a cliché," he mumbled to Jack.

Faith blinked at them. "Not if it doesn't mean what you think it does."

Jack looked behind him at the empty space and then back at Faith, who was already laying out a new deck of cards, this time ones with Alice in Wonderland images on them. "Can you see…?"

She laid down the Page of Wands. "I didn't need to see him to know he's there." Rashid stepped forward and Faith did look at him then, her face blank as a loan shark's eyes. "Good night, Captain."

END

**Author's Note:**

> 1) Maggie's opera is Turandot, and the aria is [In questa reggia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_questa_reggia), (In this palace). Maggie is finishing Turandot's ominous ending couplet: _Straniero! Non tentar la fortuna! Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte una!_ (Stranger! Do not tempt Fortune! The riddles are three, Death is one!)
> 
> 2) [Whose House? Run's house.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtVFcJiqHSQ)
> 
> [Soundtracks](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/492599.html)   
> [Master Post](http://amand-r.livejournal.com/493268.html)


End file.
